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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alan Shutko" data-source="post: 3624872" data-attributes="member: 23694">In case someone thought I came down hard on Firzair, let me explain a little more in detail.  Again,  I've gone down this path before.  I was coming up with the perfectly general character generator... it had ways to define each attribute, calculations, tables, etc....Then I realized I'd just invented Excel.  Except mine was less flexible, had worse formatting options, and way less documentation.  There are millions of people in the world who know Excel.  How many knew my new system?  One.Chargen is so complicated these days, and there are so many new options coming out every day, that the only way a project can be successful is if it has the largest community around it as possible, creating content and defining the rules within the app.  Any decision that shrinks the number of people who are capable of helping out decreases the chance of your app gaining traction.  So the trade-off has to be: only decrease your potential community if the increase in productivity you gain is worth it.  For instance, Excel (as successful as it is with Heroforge) doesn't make multiperson development very easy, so you might be able to gain in productivity by switching to something else, even though fewer people will be able to help.For instance, you might switch to python (which is used in a lot of computer games these days as a scripting language) which has a reasonably large development community you can draw from, is dynamic enough to make loading in new functionality easy, and has lots of documentation, libraries and tool support.  Or if you want a database-backed website, Ruby on Rails has lots of docs and makes it dead simple to do simple things, and it's getting more people trying it out all the time.  If you can build on something like that, you get to use all sorts of resources other people can do.  If you want to write your own stack from the ground up, you have to do all that work yourself.  And I guarantee, you don't have time to do all that.  No one person does.</blockquote>

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