The whole point of programming language conferences is to focus on bleeding edge "what's new/potentially coming down the pike", instead of "what's being adopted

The whole point of programming language conferences is to focus on bleeding edge "what's new/potentially coming down the pike", instead of "what's being adopted massively". Of course the type of people who want to dabble with different languages are going to move around. Most of the rest of the world wants to learn the one language that mostly gets them where they need to go, and be done with it. There is a photo I recently saw of 1200 students starting in Berkeley's introductory data science class. They're doing Python. Are there even 1200 serious Chapel users in the world?! I mean, I love the ideas in Chapel (and even the early ZPL), and I drew inspiration from them. But the fate of a computer language is as much determined by the growth dynamics of its user community as by its differentiating features.