This is pretty clearly not the case. Apple and Facebook are companies, not platforms. The platforms these companies develop are wildly successful and loved by developers.
I think you may be too focused on how developers decide a platform that is already successful. In that case, yes, which one is already adopted the most deserves strong consideration. However, when it comes to actually achieving adoption, it’s the platform that developers flock to that tend to succeed, all else being equal. We are talking about relatively fresh terrain here. There isn’t already a huge federated system like this that has a lot of mainstream adoption.
A lot of folks seem to think this kind of technology needs to be marketed or launched the way a hip Silicon Valley startup should be. I understand how the argument that critical mass is the necessary ingredient for success would appeal to people, but it’s not like the Internet succeeded that way. In fact, it’s probably better if foundational technology like this is developed and grown more slowly and deliberately. I have no idea if solid will take off the way the web has, but it stands a fighting chance. More than being a “viable competitor” to the web, it needs to be a platform that people want to develop for. As with the web, cloud and mobile ecosystems, the platform that developers want to support is the one that wins. If you want to see something like solid take off, play around with it for a bit. Try making it go and share your experience.
I don’t think that’s entirely true. A lot of the ideas talked about in this article and that most people have already become familiar with are not very abstract. If you tried to build a large application out of nothing but pure function application, of course your code would become complex. We need more frameworks or libraries to take some of these ideas and bring them together in a way that scales. Elm, Vue and React are examples of tech that are doing this and, I think, make functional programming extremely appealing.
You might be able to foster a deeper appreciation for some of these ideas by playing with Elm a little bit. Some time ago, they implemented time-travel in the standard debugger, and its a really wonderful feature. The site also has some demo apps that make it easy to play around with that time travel support.
I agree that, currently, languages and frameworks don’t make things like time travel easy, insofar as such a feature is not often built in. However, technologies like Flux and Vuex are paving the way for such things to become mainstream. It’s worth pointing out, too, that both were inspired by Elm’s runtime architecture.
Functional programming is, only in the last half-decade or so started to see a relatively dramatic rise in popularity. I think this trend will continue for a long time to come. For that reason, it’s worth learning more about these concepts.
I'd argue that's not entirely true. Consider, for example, the fact that corporate prisons exist in America. I would say there is a difference in governance, but I hesitate to speculate about cultural differences.
The parent post shouldn't be interpreted as dismissing the argument because it isn't interesting but because it has been beaten to death. It's the kind of argument that has been had from every meaningful angle and the programming community has, unless I'm wildly mistaken, settled on a few conclusions regarding it. Like a lot of things, one conclusion is simply that Lisp syntax being good, bad, easy or difficult to read comes down in part to preference of the individual. Of course there are other conclusions as well, but the point is that dwelling on the subject is generally not a productive use of time. It's so old and popular to discuss that very little of value comes from discussing it further, and repeating the arguments is both distracting and potentially even discouraging for some less experienced programmers.
This is an incredibly common stance, and it's also very obviously problematic. No one is saying that your experience in software is invalid or that you're wrong about "these modern frameworks" having been wrong in their time. However, if you aren't yourself working as a frontend developer in a modern startup-ey development environment, you aren't in a position to make so many assumptions about the problems such developers do or do not have. Surely, as professionals and adults, we can all appreciate that we are each dealing with problems in the world for which people believe we deserve to be paid. We all take what we do seriously, and are trying to build the best tools we can to do the best work possible. Even if something comes in as a fad, what good is it to bawk at a perfectly valuable learning experience?
I think you may be too focused on how developers decide a platform that is already successful. In that case, yes, which one is already adopted the most deserves strong consideration. However, when it comes to actually achieving adoption, it’s the platform that developers flock to that tend to succeed, all else being equal. We are talking about relatively fresh terrain here. There isn’t already a huge federated system like this that has a lot of mainstream adoption.