I’m invested because higher adoption of my preferred platform causes prices of said platform to drop, making the platform economically attractive to develop for.
Fewer users causes less effort to go into the platform by larger corporations due to lower revenue streams, diminishing updates and feature count over time.
Eventually, users leave due to pain points not being addressed. Shrinking user bases causes independent developer talent to focus on other platforms since the economics no longer work in the marginal case.
The shrinking independent developer contributions to the ecosystem make the required effort to develop for it that much higher, since the tools and apps that would have been built weren’t.
Higher development costs slow down feature pacing, due to the increased effort needed to substitute the efforts of missing ecosystem developers.
Lack of feature cadence drives users to other platforms, shrinking the user base, bringing us back to step 1.
I started using Python ~15 years ago. I didn’t go to school for CS.
Compared to using literally anything else at the time as a beginner, pip was the best thing out there that I could finally understand for getting third party code to work with my stuff, without copy paste… on Windows.
When I tried Linux, package managers and make were pretty cool for doing C/C++ work.
Despite all that, us “regular” engineers were consigned to Windows.
We either had to use VBA or a runtime that didn’t need to be installed.