I think the author is making an implicit and questionable assumption: namely that the top end of the S curve doesn’t dip back down again. But that’s not true. S

I think the author is making an implicit and questionable assumption: namely that the top end of the S curve doesn’t dip back down again. But that’s not true. Standards change, use cases change, operating systems change, and unless there’s a lot of work going into maintaining those libraries - or building new ones - the existing libraries slowly become less useful. Yeah, they provide a base, but then you’ll have to work around a quirky bug because you’re using it in a way the original author never intended, or other libraries you need to solve this problem don’t exist, or... My point is that the S curve only remains an “S” through constant ongoing effort by the community, and that’s what makes a language viable _for a domain_. (I should also point the it that that curve actually represents the viability of a language for a particular problem domain.)