If we assume, basically, that only The Winner Language should ever be used, we either end up with a long-term glut on technology churn (e.g. JavaScript's miserable state of instability right now, but for everything and not just JavaScript) or rapid development of novel forms of mediocrity (Java), and nobody should ever bother with Python, in which case the previous commentary still makes no sense because Python isn't "The Winner".
Sufficient investment for significant ongoing value is a matter of a threshold relevant to the particular needs served by the target technology, not of rank. As long as there's "enough" interest, it will have as much likelihood of stable or increasing value for (appropriately targeted) users as anything else.
Meanwhile, too much investment from too-big interested parties can ruin something pretty thoroughly.
Things are not as straightforwardly popularity-contest-driven as you seem to suggest.
> Things are not as straightforwardly popularity-contest-driven as you seem to suggest.
Popularity contests are not simple.
Programming is an huge field comprising many unsyncronized industries and fields. Each of them can have its own winner (or winners) and they interact in complex ways. How is beyond the point.
My claim is that having the most mindshare/resources is the simplest way to keep having the most mindshare/resources. Few technologies rely only o this to stay alive, but a relevant factor is that differently than many other (often technical) advantages this one has a positive feedback loop.
Coming back to the original topic, this might mean that even if you invest a lot in the "best" tool to solve your problems it is possible that the lack of ecosystem around it (due to other people choosing "worse" tools for the same problems) makes it a losing investment.
Of course things are not linear and even the best interpolations have only intervals of validity, yet general long-term trends and cycles exist.
If you want you can add a rate of decay to the weight of nodes in the model, but the point remain: resource distribution is typically not fair in any a priori sense; often it simply scale with the already available resources.
Example: Bitcoin is the among biggest cryptocoins mostly because it was the biggest at some point.
> My claim is that having the most mindshare/resources is the simplest way to keep having the most mindshare/resources.
That's largely true. Of course, having "enough" mindshare/resources is plenty, generally; one needn't necessarily have "the most". I don't see Ruby or Rails going away any time soon, even if your local area's angel.co listings show a 40% higher rate of job postings that explicitly mention Django in the headline. Development is still quite active both on, and with, the language and the framework.
> Coming back to the original topic, this might mean that even if you invest a lot in the "best" tool to solve your problems it is possible that the lack of ecosystem around it (due to other people choosing "worse" tools for the same problems) makes it a losing investment.
If your choice is Smalltalk, that might be true. If it's actually a very active community around a language and framework that provide extremely good productivity support and a lot of advanced tooling constantly attracting more innovation and heavily used in some sectors, like Ruby and Rails, it's not so true. There's pretty much guaranteed (absent government-granted monopolies) to be quite a bit of diversity in "popular enough" languages and tools for any high-traffic development sector, and "startups" definitely qualifies as such a sector of development as a field of professional work. The "winner" approach you seem to want to champion would have room for basically two options, and both of them have "Java" in the names of their most popular implementations, so arguing about the relative popularity of a Python framework in one corner of the world is irrelevant at best given your evidently intended thesis.
> Example: Bitcoin is the among biggest cryptocoins mostly because it was the biggest at some point.
This is a good point, but does not address the fact that this doesn't mean discounting Decred or Monero as a terrible choice for any useful timescale is the obvious best option.
Ruby on Rails is more popular in some areas than Django. Ruby on Rails gets a lot of time and money investment. Ruby on Rails is likely to be a good, stable choice for years to come. That example illustrates the fact that always choosing "the winner" doesn't make sense if "the winner" involves choosing the second-worst tool for your specific job out of a field of a dozen or more available tools.
Sufficient investment for significant ongoing value is a matter of a threshold relevant to the particular needs served by the target technology, not of rank. As long as there's "enough" interest, it will have as much likelihood of stable or increasing value for (appropriately targeted) users as anything else.
Meanwhile, too much investment from too-big interested parties can ruin something pretty thoroughly.
Things are not as straightforwardly popularity-contest-driven as you seem to suggest.