>How can other languages without a big corporate sponsor attract funding to help grow the language and build related libraries? People will switch to new tools

>How can other languages without a big corporate sponsor attract funding to help grow the language and build related libraries? People will switch to new tools when they are roughly 2x better than their current way of getting something done. If you specialize in a niche and make better tool optimized for that niche, you might get all of the people interested in that niche. The internet reaches most of humanity now, so even the smallest niche can be enough to sustain interest. Alternatively, you can bring a new approach to a problem, a better mousetrap. Since people are flooded with such claims, the best way to gain traction is to show the tool having successfully used on several non-trivial projects. You can then use a "these cool things were build using X" marketing strategy. Neither of these requires corporate involvement, just persistence and authentically listening to feedback and learning from it.