That really depends on which language you're talking about. An opposite trend I've been noticing is that big languages steal ideas from some smaller language a

That really depends on which language you're talking about. An opposite trend I've been noticing is that big languages steal ideas from some smaller language and absorb its community: for example a lot of R ideas have been pulled into Python libraries, resulting in a migration from R to the more capable Python. R's syntax is nicer for statistical computing, but having access to the larger Python ecosystem with slightly worse syntax turns out to be more valuable in the long run. > Why did someone create Gleam and how is it being used in production today? I'm an outsider to this community, so I'd trust someone with inside information over myself, but my outside impression is that Gleam was invented to push Erlang's potential for extremely high reliability even farther. Gleam's strong type system lets you create software that rarely fails, and on top of Erlang/OTP's "let it fail" philosophy you have battle-tested patterns for recovering from failures when they do happen. The use case is for networking software which requires high levels of security, scalability, and fault-tolerance, such as cryptocurrencies and end-to-end encrypted messaging systems (it's used by WhatsApp and I think the NEAR cryptocurrency though I can't find a reference for the latter claim).