"English popularity is self re enforcing. It's popular because it's popular. Not because it is concise or particularly good at anything it does. It arguably isn

"English popularity is self re enforcing. It's popular because it's popular. Not because it is concise or particularly good at anything it does. It arguably isn't that great for a lot of things people use it for. A lot of that popularity just stems from people already knowing it and the existence of lots of idioms and tropes. It's a bit like the Greek (if you are old enough to remember that being popular) of the casual conversation world. Lots of people use it that aren't necessarily very good authors or rhetoricians or even focused on that." This is just to say that yes, programming languages are like natural languages in this respect. In fact one of the key insights behind the development of Python was "code is read more often than it is written." I think once you internalize that idea it makes sense that programming languages would achieve popularity for the same reasons that natural languages do.