I guess an important distinction here is popularity by choice rather than circumstances - many basic, cobol, pascal, etc. programmers may prefer to use another

I guess an important distinction here is popularity by choice rather than circumstances - many basic, cobol, pascal, etc. programmers may prefer to use another language. Then again many lisp programmers may be in the same situation, e.g. AI or emacs users ;) I think overall continued popularity is a less interesting metric than actual demonstrations of benefits of a language, as far as we can given how incredibly difficult it is to demonstrate an actual quantitative advantage for _any_ language.