I feel that there is a particular "race horse" mindset when it comes to programming languages. It's very academic - for a thing to be good, it needs to have no

I feel that there is a particular "race horse" mindset when it comes to programming languages. It's very academic - for a thing to be good, it needs to have novel, never before implemented features, it needs to have intellectually superior properties, it needs to have them first, etc. I used to think more this way in school. It leads one to view the world as two camps: the language makers, who compete with the best new features in order to woo the language users (the industry). This results in being disappointed and puzzled that the language users consistently ignore the new shiny stuff and pick an ostensibly boring unsexy choice. However languages are not startup companies trying to sell a product, it's the other way around. The popular ones are largely driven by industry to suit the industry needs, which are largely very conservative. Nobody wants another Perl 6 or Python 3.