1. Being good is not enough to be popular. In most cases to be popular a technology needs to be actively promoted by a big brand (of at least a non-profit found

1. Being good is not enough to be popular. In most cases to be popular a technology needs to be actively promoted by a big brand (of at least a non-profit foundation). E. g. Java is popular thanks to Sun and Go thanks to Google. Also it helps to have free of cheap tools. 2. This problem also has another side - C is much more popular than the language itself warrants. I see here following reasons: 1. Unix (which is popular in academia since 70s-80s) and later GCC (it was hard to compete with a free compiler at times when most other required an expensive license) 2. Microsoft designated C and C++ as "official" languages for Windows: MS provided IDE - Visual C++ supported only C/C++ [1] and official documentation implies that everybody uses C or C++ to create Windows apps. [1] Visual Studio later added .Net support, but this not reduced C/C++ popularity because .Net competes mostly with Java.