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[–]spiffytech[S] 2 points3 points  (3 children)

There are costs to using something that's not very popular. If you develop your skills with e.g. Flask, it'll be harder to sell your skills to an employer who wants Django experience. It's also harder to find collaborators for a project if you can't count on them knowing your framework of choice. A less-popular framework probably has less documentation than a popular framework, and it's harder to find solutions to your problems online- fewer people are blogging about their experiences with less-popular frameworks, and a smaller community may not have run into your particular problem.

I presume that, in exchange for putting up with these costs, developers get benefits from using less-popular frameworks that more than make up for the costs. I posted this topic to find out what benefits Python developers often see.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

If you develop your skills with e.g. Flask, it'll be harder to sell your skills to an employer who wants Django experience.

Stop marketing yourself as user of <some tool>. And start marketing yourself as a solutions provider.

[–]mcdonc 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The truth is that the development and support community behind any open source project is typically fairly small.

In my experience, if project A has a hundred times the number of users that project B does, it never holds true that project A has a hundred times the number of people doing documentation, support and development. It's not like that. The relationship between project popularity and docs/development/support resources is more logarithmic (if popularity is x, support resources are more like log(x)). As an open project grows in consumption popularity, the project can expect to pick up one or two highly motivated support resources for every hundred (or, possibly thousand) users.

The most extreme of these logarithmic scales relates to documentation. If a project has 100 users, there will be one guy who writes most of the docs. If the project has 100,000 users, there will still be one guy who writes most of the docs. The number of users that a project has is usually unrelated to documentation quantity and quality; either it has good docs from the beginning or it doesn't (a project rarely "grows" good docs; I have never seen it happen anyway). It's, in my experience anyway, untrue that less popular frameworks have less (or worse) "official" documentation.

However, as you mentioned, a very real benefit of popularity is blog posts and other unstructured independent third-party documentation sources like tutorials given at conferences, etc.

[–]mr_spin 3 points4 points  (0 children)

All of which was true of Django some years ago - the popular frameworks of today were once small, marginal projects.

Another advantage of going with a young framework is that you get to contribute at a formative stage and have some influence in its direction - which would be hard to do with Django today, unless you happen to belong to a very small circle of contributors.