If we've measured the value of jobs by their popularity, everyone would want to be a retail salesperson or a cashier - according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, these are most common occupations in the States. People still writing Clojure professionally after 15 years (of other languages) are disproportionately serious engineers. The language self-selects. Small community means concentrated competence, not weakness.
The network effect assumption is wrong here - a programming language isn't a social network. A better hammer isn't worse because fewer people own one. Most job listings reflect what organizations already know how to hire for, not what produces the most value.
If we've measured the value of jobs by their popularity, everyone would want to be a retail salesperson or a cashier - according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, these are most common occupations in the States. People still writing Clojure professionally after 15 years (of other languages) are disproportionately serious engineers. The language self-selects. Small community means concentrated competence, not weakness. The network effect assumption is wrong here - a programming language isn't a social network. A better hammer isn't worse because fewer people own one. Most job listings reflect what organizations already know how to hire for, not what produces the most value.