Yeah this article is kind of a mess. It wants to have a data-driven perspective, but what the data shows is "people tend to like newer languages more." Now, thi

Yeah this article is kind of a mess. It wants to have a data-driven perspective, but what the data shows is "people tend to like newer languages more." Now, this could be because there are fewer legacy projects in newer languages. Or it could be because newer languages learned lessons from older languages. Python is still considered "well-loved" despite being pretty old, while its contemporaries C++ and Java are fairly disliked — this is (probably) because Python actually innovated over those other languages in a lot of ways. And languages which learned from Python (JS, TS, Julia, Dart) are all well-loved, with the possible exception of Ruby, which famously differs from Python with its TMTOWTDI philosophy. I'm not necessarily saying that there is obviously a forward march of programming language progress, but it's worth noting that the data the author's looking at can just as easily acommodate that thesis too.