Programming languages don't win because they are inherently better. Programming languages win because they fill a need better, or are more familiar. There are

Programming languages don't win because they are inherently better. Programming languages win because they fill a need better, or are more familiar. There are better languages than other, that help people to write better code, have bugs be easier to find, push better paradigms. But thats not what decides a programming language winner. A winner helps someone do X faster or with less effort. If better languages want to win they need to both be better, and be first to tackle niche X before a worse / familiar language does. And do it sufficiently significantly better to overcome the "familiarity benefit" a worse language will get that enters the same space. A not perfect example - typescript is almost the exact same language as JS and it took almost a decade for people to realize that unless you're writing small solo projects TS is better in just about every way. That is a best case scenario for comparison. Identical syntax, fully backwards compatible. On "language" a complete subset of the other (so no wars about losing a to gain be so is the trade off worth it), almost no new paradigm to learn and it still took our industry almost a decade to agree that it's universally better. If it takes that long to evaluate a clear cut case, its strong evidence that language benefit is not what primarilt drives language adoption. I've been around since the arguments about how Python would never be adopted because "white space was significant and that's a terrible syntax choice." That its distracting and takes mental focus. I've seen all the arguments. When a syntax is different it slows adoption drastically. Not because its worse but people we're humans. People don't like change. Then Python solved a need bettet then everything else and it took off. And once you use Python regularly you see how absurd those whitespace arguments were. JS and its approach took over because that's what the web was written in. If the language of the web had been chosen to be Lisp (as almost happened), everyone would be using Lisp right now without giving it a second thought.