It is an interesting observation! I'm sure there are a few unrelated factors going on to influence that plus some inadvertent cherry-picking. But I do think th

It is an interesting observation! I'm sure there are a few unrelated factors going on to influence that plus some inadvertent cherry-picking. But I do think there is a thing to the observation too. If I had to make a guess, I'd point to a combination of: 1. This was right around the time that computers were fast enough to afford the runtime cost of garbage collection while still delivering usable apps. The GC languages before the 90s (Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Self) had reputations for abysmal performance and have largely (but not entirely) died out. 2. This was also the boom of the Internet and web which shifted a lot of computation to server-side after the PC boom had shifted it client-side. That also enabled somewhat slower languages with GC to thrive because first-mover advantage was more valuable than using your servers efficiently. You could just throw more hardware at it. 3. That boom also created a huge influx of new developers who picked up whatever language happened to be hot at the time. And once they had, they tended to stick with it. I can't find a good graph of the number of software engineers over time but I'd bet that there's a noticeable uptick around the dotcom boom.