Oh, I love Elm! Anyway, success depends on whether something achieves a goal. So, if Elm's goal is
[...] to be an exceptionally good programming language and platform for building front-end web applications
Then that's totally cool, but how do you know if you're succeeding at it? I'd propose identifying things you can measure which indicate how effectively Elm achieves this goal. Note that popularity does seem like a reasonable metric because we'd expect that if it's exceptionally good at this, then more people would want to use it for this purpose. Given the specific hurdles of Elm (it looks and feels different from the languages most people know), conversions could be a better metric. Eg how many people that try Elm for a week continue using it for their front end projects. Or perhaps twitter sentiment analysis or something.
Anyway, if someone then points at popularity or market share, you can point them to a page saying "this is our goal, this is how we're measuring, these are our numbers over time." And I think that will make total sense to anyone and also help guide your decisions. If you do it, then do be careful about gaming the metrics, b/c success isn't actually excelling at these metrics, it's achieving what the metrics are expected to indicate.
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Oh, I love Elm! Anyway, success depends on whether something achieves a goal. So, if Elm's goal is
Then that's totally cool, but how do you know if you're succeeding at it? I'd propose identifying things you can measure which indicate how effectively Elm achieves this goal. Note that popularity does seem like a reasonable metric because we'd expect that if it's exceptionally good at this, then more people would want to use it for this purpose. Given the specific hurdles of Elm (it looks and feels different from the languages most people know), conversions could be a better metric. Eg how many people that try Elm for a week continue using it for their front end projects. Or perhaps twitter sentiment analysis or something.
Anyway, if someone then points at popularity or market share, you can point them to a page saying "this is our goal, this is how we're measuring, these are our numbers over time." And I think that will make total sense to anyone and also help guide your decisions. If you do it, then do be careful about gaming the metrics, b/c success isn't actually excelling at these metrics, it's achieving what the metrics are expected to indicate.