Dismissively claiming "meh, all of this is old hat" makes OP sound wise, but it doesn't stand up to closer scrutiny. Of course all new languages owe a great dea

Dismissively claiming "meh, all of this is old hat" makes OP sound wise, but it doesn't stand up to closer scrutiny. Of course all new languages owe a great deal of debt to what came before, and that's exactly what you'd expect. The vast majority of ideas that humans come up with owe a great deal to previous ideas. We copy, remix, extract the essence, infuse with some inspiration and voila, new idea! Take Rust for example. It has several cool features, many of which are copied from other languages. Only an idiot would sit on the sidelines and say "oh what's so great about a package manager like cargo, Ruby has had that for a decade". A smarter person would realise that this is exactly how great ideas spread, and what's important is the combination of ideas and features that the language chooses. For Rust it's zero-cost abstractions, a good package manager, no data races, generics and sum types. Maybe this is the exact combination that's perfect for your use case. I'm no Rust fanboy either, I just chose it because it's the newest one I could think of. I'm sure I could make a similarly strong case for many other popular languages.