Kirin, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. More of this stuff is due to luck and randomness than most people admit. We look back and find a few

Kirin, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. More of this stuff is due to luck and randomness than most people admit. We look back and find a few contributing factors, put them in a pile, and call it a theory, and believe we understand it. But does that theory actually limit what we'd predict about the future? Does it retroactively predict all the past data that we've seen? As you pointed out, Lisp was quite popular for a bit. What if we just said, Lisp isn't popular because it didn't get/stay lucky? That anti-theory isn't quite as satisfying, but at least it doesn't pretend at knowledge that it doesn't have. One really nice thing, in my opinion, about JavaScript programmers is that they don't sit around kvetching about why the wrong language won. We all know it was a fluke, but the fluke happened, and here we are, so you can either squawk about languages, or get real things done instead, and improve the tools and software that you have.