IMO ecosystem, tooling and support is what makes a language mainstream. Having a domain is something that comes afterwards. e.g. * Ruby had Rails * PHP had m

IMO ecosystem, tooling and support is what makes a language mainstream. Having a domain is something that comes afterwards. e.g. * Ruby had Rails * PHP had mod_php and a strong Apache-oriented community * Java had strong support from Sun * Python for scientific computing because of numpy, etc. If numpy and friends were made for Ruby instead, I think we’d be in a different world.