The languages that tend to become popular are simply languages that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Java was the language invented for the "common prog

The languages that tend to become popular are simply languages that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Java was the language invented for the "common programmer", and people find that comforting. Now it's Go; as Rob Pike once said of it, "They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." That's why it's always a battle to push languages like Lisp, that offer mathematical elegance over languages that are a soup of half baked idea that veer programmers away from ideas that take more than a few days to master. For those of us who aspire to do better, we should continue to try to bring the from first principles approach of functional programming to the mainstream.