While I agree with the main thrust of the article, in my opinion what killed Cappuccino was that it was big, weird, and rather opaque. Did it ever occur to you that maybe it was just too much? One thing I liked about jQuery was that my webpages didn't have to become applications, they could just be webpages with behavior. It worked within the paradigm, you might say, and that's what I wanted and it's what my clients wanted too. SproutCore didn't see heavy adoption either. GWT probably had more than both, but it wasn't the #1 or #2 Java framework.
I wanted to love Cappuccino, but I didn't know Cocoa or Objective-C. Your team was spread so thin I remember wondering--how much time are they putting into Objective-J, how much into Cappuccino, how much into 280 Slides? When 280 Slides shut down, it looked to me (as an outsider) as the beginning of the inevitable cascade of plug-pulling that happens when a small team realizes they bit off more than they can chew. Imagine what it would have done to Rails adoption if Basecamp had been shut down. It was the flagship product.
It's hard to imagine jQuery being shut down, but suppose it did. With Zepto and everything else, it wouldn't be the end of the world for me--my investment in it is safe. Imagine if I had written tens of thousands of lines of Objective-J. Does this blog post make me feel like I made a safe investment? We like light libraries over massive frameworks because light libraries really can't take our applications down with them. You may have brought an impressive engineering mindset to this problem, and this is a problem that deserves it, but we're still talking about 4 years from start to finish. If you want me to go "all in" on something that could take years of my work down in a ball of flame, forgive me if I'm distrustful of three kids doing a startup and trying to reinvent the world.
I wanted to love Cappuccino, but I didn't know Cocoa or Objective-C. Your team was spread so thin I remember wondering--how much time are they putting into Objective-J, how much into Cappuccino, how much into 280 Slides? When 280 Slides shut down, it looked to me (as an outsider) as the beginning of the inevitable cascade of plug-pulling that happens when a small team realizes they bit off more than they can chew. Imagine what it would have done to Rails adoption if Basecamp had been shut down. It was the flagship product.
It's hard to imagine jQuery being shut down, but suppose it did. With Zepto and everything else, it wouldn't be the end of the world for me--my investment in it is safe. Imagine if I had written tens of thousands of lines of Objective-J. Does this blog post make me feel like I made a safe investment? We like light libraries over massive frameworks because light libraries really can't take our applications down with them. You may have brought an impressive engineering mindset to this problem, and this is a problem that deserves it, but we're still talking about 4 years from start to finish. If you want me to go "all in" on something that could take years of my work down in a ball of flame, forgive me if I'm distrustful of three kids doing a startup and trying to reinvent the world.