> 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.
I did not, in fact, say they were.
> 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.