The biggest lesson I learned at my last startup is that your dev platform is an HR decision.
After the fact, I realized it would have been smart to at least check Indeed Trends to find out how niche our platform was. If you aren't seeing many jobs asking for CodeIgniter, just to use as an example, don't count on finding a lot of developers. If you have a good company, you're better off competing for talent head-to-head on a rising platform.
It doesn't quite work that way. Strictly speaking, you will find more developers if you choose the technology of the week or some other popular thing. But that doesn't mean that you'll find more good developers. They're difficult to find no matter what technology you're working with.
That said, you're on the right track as far as realizing that technology has an impact on who you hire. I would choose one more because it helps set you apart from other companies, not because it's what everyone else is using.
Having inadvertently chosen something (almost) no one was using, except us, I mightily regret not doing a sanity check to get the big picture. It made hiring really expensive and slow.
I'm a bit suspicious of their trends. It shows Perl significantly ahead of PHP, which is significantly ahead of Python. As a Perl programmer, I wish that were true, but I doubt it.
It also has COBOL ahead of Python up until 2008. I am skeptical of that.
After the fact, I realized it would have been smart to at least check Indeed Trends to find out how niche our platform was. If you aren't seeing many jobs asking for CodeIgniter, just to use as an example, don't count on finding a lot of developers. If you have a good company, you're better off competing for talent head-to-head on a rising platform.
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=codeigniter%2Ccakephp&...