I agree and will also add that pg seems to have missed some other ingredients of a language's power, especially libraries and tools. Python and Ruby (and Perl

I agree and will also add that pg seems to have missed some other ingredients of a language's power, especially libraries and tools. Python and Ruby (and Perl before them) got big not just as “easy” languages, but as languages that get the job done quickly thanks to the massive amount of libraries. And while Java, C, and C++ may not be the most elegant of languages, the amount of tools to inspect the code, find bugs, prove properties about the code, safely refactor the code, and test it from the unit level to the level of an ecosystem is what keeps some programmers interested in those languages.