Signaling to Arcane
Signaling
What if tech stack choice is mainly about signaling group membership? Signals must be costly, so does it follow that Framework X can only become popular if it’s harder do something with framework X to do the same thing without X?
Emoji
Was adding Unicode to emoji a mistake? With emoji, the font carries unusually great semantic weight. On one hand, that’s not fundamentally different from any other language: a listener in a different context often hears something different from what the speaker means to say. With pictographs like emoji, however, there’s an obvious way to improve the clarity: send the actual picture.
Franca
Do JavaScript and English succeed as lingua francas for similar reasons? They both have complicated, irregular orthography and large vocabularies. Or does the causality run the other way?
Arcane
Is there any quantifiable evidence whether or not starting with some arcane tech is more likely to make a successful company than starting with something mainstream? A commenter claims that startups should use unusual stacks as way to attract good programmers, while big companies can’t afford it because they need to hire so many. This could be plausible if there’s a point when economies of scale outweigh the benefits of skilled workers, and another comment mentions a related story.