My definition of success for shadowcat doesn't require that level of growth. I'm sure many, many companies have a definition of success that doesn't require a '

My definition of success for shadowcat doesn't require that level of growth. I'm sure many, many companies have a definition of success that doesn't require a 'rate of rate of growth' congruent with being 'part of YC'. Given that, attempting to apply the same definition of success to a programming language just seems silly, especially given explosive growth usually ends up with a disastrous pop culture - think 1999-era Perl or 2003-era PHP or 2006-era Rails for examples where the majority of people using the language weren't necessarily adding noticeable value to the ecosystem, and in the long term have created a lot of hatred for the respective platforms as a result of code that was just plain bad.