If you're talking about more than trivial applications(examples: computational geometry, statistics, parsing and saving common formats) libraries become importa

If you're talking about more than trivial applications(examples: computational geometry, statistics, parsing and saving common formats) libraries become important as a means of offloading effort. They can be abused, for sure, and by being overly general purpose they can often cause no end of trouble, but using a few good libraries appropriate to the domain may result in 1000x less time to get productive results, even if the language sucks. So you've just gotta have libraries. The problem a lot of new languages face is that they aren't different enough to necessitate building out a new set of libraries. Bindings to C are an ugly 80% solution, good enough for most cases, and they have the nasty result of making C even more all-consuming as the source of all library code. haXe and Factor are both good examples of languages that have a basis with which to grow their libraries. haXe is getting uptake from a variety of angles but the emphasis is clear the everyone involved wants to minimize the costs of multiple-language incompatibilities, and that is resulting in powerful libraries across multiple domains. I don't know the details of Factor's growth, but I suspect that it is doing so on its strengths as a "next-gen" concatenation language in a field with little comparable competitors. Both languages have C bindings available, but haXe in particular has strong reasons to create native libraries.