What makes a framework / project "succeed"? When is it no longer a hobby?

[swader]

What makes a language or framework “real”? In other words, when does it succeed? When does it stop being an experiment, a hobby project?

I was looking at some of my exposure to certain projects, from Angular 1 to Phalcon, from Python to Scala and R, from VueJS to React, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’m not seeing some commonalities. More on those in an upcoming post where I’ll have some interesting data to show, but in the meanwhile, I’d like to hear from you. The question is:

Other than itself being flagged as 1.0, at which point can a programming language or framework be taken seriously? When would you consider adopting it as a daily tool?

We all know people jumped on the NodeJS bandwagon long, long before 1.0, and we also know it was nothing but the interest of the community which actually allowed Go to get to 1.0 at all (it was a test until then - one that lasted for 3 years). So two very different scenarios, yet two environments which are so ubiquitous these days, one can hardly hide from their influence.

What causes leaps of faith of this kind, and when do they stop being leaps of faith? Please tell me what you think, let’s discuss this!

[James_Hibbard]

For me it’d be when they are adopted by a “big name” company.

This is actually a problem for Elm which started life as some geezer’s PhD project. It shows a lot of promise and a lot of people are quite excited about it, but as far as I can see it has failed to gain any significant traction, as there are no well-known companies who have adopted it / are using it on big projects.

Same could have been said for Vue until Laravel started bundling it and it (Vue) was picked up by Alibaba.