This effect does exist but it's short-lived...

Posted Jan 22, 2009 10:29 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Semantic patching with Coccinelle by njs
Parent article: Semantic patching with Coccinelle

Yes, darcs benefited for a time from the fact that it could attract all these people - but the end result was the same: when C crowd got it's shiny new bauble (Git) all other projects were left in dust...

Sometimes it's good idea to use non-mainstream language because it's the only way to produce something and you don't need many contributors: one of the most popular DFT library (FFTW) is written in OCaml (well, kinda). But it does limit number of potential contributors! No way to avoid this...