Common patterns in the spreading of a language or an ecosystem?

I’ve been spent long joining the online tech communities of JavaScript. Since 2011 Node.js started spreading in China. Since 2014 React began to spread in China. I witness them growing. It made me think a lot about how to spread it, what should we do and not do? Same questions are in spreading ClojureScript in China now, and for us a small group of people.

JavaScript is merely a small piece of the whole picture of mainstream programming languages. Do you see pattern in all kinds of languages that why they spread, how they spread, what factored are related?

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I still find this talk by Neal Ford quite relevant for that topic. It is a few years old (first Clojure conj or so :slight_smile:), but the analysis about “how to make it as a language” is still relevant IMO.
Although the title of the talk infers it, is not just about enterprise - most of it applies to attracting the “open source”/“community”/anyone non-enterprise - crowd.

You could try organizing a Meetup. We’re doing this in Paris, France (well @hiram-madelaine mostly) and I remember we started as a very small group a few years ago, 10 people max, with nobody doing Closure professionally. Now we’re almost 50 at each Meetup and many of us are using it daily. I think a Meetup helps a lot beginner in their learning path, to point they feel confident introducing it in their daily job or joining a company that uses Clojure. It also helps companies promote themselves and show that they’re interested in Clojure.

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