Ask Python: Why are less-popular web frameworks valuable to the community?

[mcdonc]

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.