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Are there examples of languages that were not popular for a long while before suddenly going mainstream (the definition of success from the article)? I feel lik

Are there examples of languages that were not popular for a long while before suddenly going mainstream (the definition of success from the article)? I feel like even a potential killer app is not enough, there were some interesting web frameworks for smalltalk (like seaside) but it wasn't enough to shake in any way the feeling that the language was a dead end for most people (and they can just wait for a reimplementation in a popular or new hyped language if it's really a good idea). Phoenix/Ecto for example would probably not get the attention it gets (and deserves) if it focused on Erlang instead of a new language with some momentum. And Lisp seems to get it even worse when all of them (old and new, with as many programming paradigms as there can be) get grouped together as one 60 year old language family. Hopefully clojure, racket and other newcomers can turn this around.

jenshk 7y ago
Ruby was created in the mid-90s, long before Ruby on Rails became the killer app.
- ddragon 7y ago
  Yes, I was thinking about that case. While Ruby was comparatively still a modern language at that point, Rails used the metaprogramming of the language to effectively create a new unique language on top of it with it's opinionated design. It might be even a point in favor of Lisp, since even in an older language like Common Lisp it can still be possible to build a new language on top that feels modern, maybe some kind of tidyverse environment for handling the next AI wave paradigm whatever it may be.
dredmorbius 7y ago
BASIC (1964) -> Visual Basic (1991).
- Narishma 7y ago
  BASIC was already very popular before VB.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    As a business programming language? It was used in teaching (I used it as such, at the time), and by hobbyists. VB allowed creating whole business systems in conjunction with Microsoft applications. Which to my recollection was quite a step beyond. Earlier business office products might have been based on WP or Lotus macros, possibly DBase. VB unified much of that.

jenshk 7y ago

Ruby was created in the mid-90s, long before Ruby on Rails became the killer app.

ddragon 7y ago
Yes, I was thinking about that case. While Ruby was comparatively still a modern language at that point, Rails used the metaprogramming of the language to effectively create a new unique language on top of it with it's opinionated design. It might be even a point in favor of Lisp, since even in an older language like Common Lisp it can still be possible to build a new language on top that feels modern, maybe some kind of tidyverse environment for handling the next AI wave paradigm whatever it may be.

dredmorbius 7y ago

BASIC (1964) -> Visual Basic (1991).

Narishma 7y ago
BASIC was already very popular before VB.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  As a business programming language? It was used in teaching (I used it as such, at the time), and by hobbyists. VB allowed creating whole business systems in conjunction with Microsoft applications. Which to my recollection was quite a step beyond. Earlier business office products might have been based on WP or Lotus macros, possibly DBase. VB unified much of that.