It's a heuristic. Although I bet you can find those things in use somewhere. This article is a little different -- "things my son would use" implies that they

It's a heuristic. Although I bet you can find those things in use somewhere. This article is a little different -- "things my son would use" implies that they're still popular, not just extant. Both questions are interesting, and influenced by the same principles. The Lindy effect is one reason I'm working on https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/, because shell is now more than 50 year old, much older than Python/JS/Ruby, etc. Concrete example from the last few days: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746280 i.e. When people want to explain a modern cloud platform, they use shell. Go would have been more obvious, but shell is clearer. Lindy prediction: shell will outlive Go :)