Here's another hypothesis: Language communities are in an arms race to create the best platform for the Cambrian Explosion of tools necessary to support a dram

Here's another hypothesis: Language communities are in an arms race to create the best platform for the Cambrian Explosion of tools necessary to support a dramatically growing and diversifying developer population. Languages with a proliferation of tools, where developers are experiencing choice fatigue, have the incentive and the usage data necessary to design the meta-tools that will make development in such an environment easy. Languages which rely on small selection to solve the problem will remain niche languages. We're just waiting for some innovations in package/community/docuentation/source control management to crystalize and make the whole problem moot.