Taking the question at face value, I think these are the issues: - the switching costs for programming languages are very high, even if you're switching to a

Taking the question at face value, I think these are the issues: - the switching costs for programming languages are very high, even if you're switching to an established language - it's hard to evaluate a new programming language; you don't know if it's good until you've written something non-trivial - learning a new language takes a lot of effort, particularly for languages that aim to be better than existing languages; better implies different - given all of the above, early adopters will probably not use the language for their day job, they'll use it for hobby projects; hobbyists are price sensitive I don't actually think having to compete with free is actually that much of an issue compared to the above. Even free languages that are genuinely improvements over more mainstream alternatives face multidecade slogs to create a small community and get some adoption.