"I think one reason is that there's no big corporation behind it" I agree. The popularity of some programming languages is undoubtedly buoyed by corporate spon

"I think one reason is that there's no big corporation behind it" I agree. The popularity of some programming languages is undoubtedly buoyed by corporate sponsorship or the association with a company. This is not a bad thing, but it means other languages struggle to generate as much interest. Also, without a generous benefactor, open source languages have to scrape funding together piecemeal from different sources. For example, both Rust and Go have had (or still have) dedicated staff writing documentation for the language. This is a luxury that other languages cannot fund or afford. I actually posted a Ask HN question of this very topic recently: Can new programming languages attract developers without funding?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27043717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27043717