Also related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4 Network effects likely explain a big part of it. Many of

Also related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4 Network effects likely explain a big part of it. Many of the "popular" languages today aren't necessarily great languages and adopted for their technical merits. Often they were the only language available on an exclusive platform everyone wanted to develop software on. Other times it was because folks wanted to write a particular kind of application and there just happened to be this framework in this weird language that made the task easy. We probably have more programming languages now than ever before but I think the market for new languages in the mainstream is relatively static. It shifts... but very slowly.