Success is linked to both attaining a goal and to higher social status. Popularity is more in the higher social status domain.
The main advantages of popularity is the amount of brainpower that comes with it.
The main advantages this brainpower brings are:
The language features are tested and used in a larger set of contexts. This reveals all kinds of issues faster.
Long tail implementations. Most of the programming done these days is not implementations from first principles but glueing together libraries or poking at a large API. With a higher popularity, more libraries that are on the long tail are implemented. This means that a person coming to Elm might just find what they need already implemented. As an example, I would give Google Captcha; I would love to have a Elm library for this as this is one of my main sources of errors in Rollbar. There are other smaller widgets/libraries that each take a lot of time to implement and are not needed by most people. However, if they are needed by 10% of the people this is already in the thousands of people.
People with domain knowledge providing better implementations of core features. Prime example here is the work done by Robin with Array.
Books, video tutorials, courses, blogposts and other teaching materials.
Jobs. This is a double edged sword. On one hand Elm is now one tool that can be used to beat the averages. On the other hand, Elm community members that want to use Elm in their day-to-day job still encounter difficulties caused by the relative obscurity of the language: local jobs not available, businesses fearful to adopt a technology for which they might have troubles finding local talent.
I would like to end by saying that popularity has its costs too. You can move quickly with a small SEALS team, not so with a large army. With larger popularity, change becomes costly. Another huge cost of popularity is the large volume of requests which can induce burnout in a small core team if they are not handled optimally.
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Success is linked to both attaining a goal and to higher social status. Popularity is more in the higher social status domain.
The main advantages of popularity is the amount of brainpower that comes with it.
The main advantages this brainpower brings are:
I would like to end by saying that popularity has its costs too. You can move quickly with a small SEALS team, not so with a large army. With larger popularity, change becomes costly. Another huge cost of popularity is the large volume of requests which can induce burnout in a small core team if they are not handled optimally.