This entire essay could be about AI adoption as well. Some programmers love to program, and while AI is great at producing the code, it doesn’t really viscerally appeal if one loves coding itself.

Bust: Python

1) Objective-C is 40 years old.

2) Objective-C was used to create NeXTSTEP and by extension Mac OS X and iOS.

3) Objective-C is no more "awkward" than any other programming language. I actually prefer its verbosity to Swift's terseness.

4) Although Swift did eventually become more popular, the claim about Objective-C that "the moment Swift existed, it evaporated" is not only false but a gross exaggeration.

* It's just a guesstimate, but one of those factors that caused java to be successful but-for (as in, if it hadn't had this, it wouldn't have been a success): It copies C style religiously anywhere it could get away with it. This caused some damage to the language that it has fixed in the past decade (such as the style and behaviour of `switch` being so bizarre - but it religiously follows exactly how it works in C!)

* Some languages end up failing partly due to community outlook. Scala is somewhat well known for having a core community that is highly aggressive and elitist, or to be a bit milder, to be 'less accepting of newbies with a limited understanding of programming concepts' than is optimal'. And in addition to that, they are in contrast to the java ecosystem ready to drop support for stuff quickly, meaning: Real life actual use of scala as a basis means you're either working with a hopelessly obsolete codebase or you're spending time refactoring it every other month pretty much. Scala's adoption is fading and never got anywhere near its hyped future.

* If a language is 'native to a platform' which I define as: "If the shepherds/owners of that platform were to write a basic app for their own platform, what language would they write it in? That's the 'native to that platform' language", then it tends to succeed even if it is not fun and not very well designed and even if transpilers exist. This is sufficient explanation for me for the success of javascript: It is the native-to-the-platform language if the biggest platform around.

These all fit within the thesis. They're all (last one is debatable) very human factors.

I can suggest a list of one killer feature per each popular language, i.e. things that these languages were the first to introduce and influence many successors:

C: extreme conciseness

C++: explicit destructors

Python: removed curly braces

Java: extreme portability

JavaScript: erm...

PHP: embedded in HTML by design

Rust: compile-time memory management

Swift: structured concurrency (pre-6 was probably just pure cuteness)

etc.

Switching languages is a big time commitment. Or at least it used to be. I find myself more open to that now that I can hit the ground running with AI coding tools in most languages. But still, it's a time investment to learn a language, its idioms, its way of doing things, all the tools, libraries, and frameworks, etc. It's not something you do an in afternoon. And certainly not mid project.

The languages that people gravitate to are the ones that look like they are safe, future proof bets. If you are going to spend all this energy learning one, you want to know it's a good investment. Successful languages have lots of users, decent tools, good libraries, etc. Or at least they look like there are serious people behind them. Many people make these bets early in their careers and then stick to them as well. I meet a fair share of people my age that are still sticking to Java. Because that's what they learned when they were in their twenties. I'm 51 now.

Rust is a good example of a language that's hard to learn but managed to get off the ground because of the solid people behind it. It wasn't just an academic exercise: Mozilla was trying to solve a real problem and they managed to get a nice community behind the language and it grew from there. This is not something that happens a lot. People create new languages all the time. But many stay very niche and the projects around them tend to go stale very quickly if they fail to attract a community of users.

Lisp is fun. The interactivity and instant turnaround of a Lisp REPL is still rarely matched in other languages. Common Lisp also solved a significant issue other languages didn't address well until much later: the ability to write high-level code that was fast on cheap hardware around the turn of the millennium.

Lisp didn't get popular around the turn of the millennium. Success stories like Naughty Dog, ITA, and Viaweb were rare, and the dominant languages seemed to be Java and various scripting languages starting with the letter P.

And in hindsight, I only grudgingly accepted the immortals, although I recognized at the time they would be widely adopted: C, C++, Java, Javascript, and Python.

Is awk still respectable? Is it even a programming language?

There’s a whole plethora of reasons a language might fall in or out of favour. From ecosystem lock in (eg Objective-C was mandatory for Apple development prior to swift and Visual Basic was ostensibly killed by Microsoft during the dot net upsell) to fragmentation in the community (eg Perl vs Raku). These don’t mean the languages aren’t “fun” nor productive.

Likewise, “fun” is such a subjective term that it’s utterly meaningless using it as any kind of yardstick. Esoteric languages are arguably the most “fun” but you don’t see companies running critical infrastructure on Brainfuck, Rockstar, nor lolcode.

And to say Pascal, Perl and Objective-C were false starts only demonstrates the author hasn’t used any computers prior to 2010. Perl was the de facto sysadmin language for literally decades. Pascal was the microcomputer language of choice before C++ took over (even to the extent that some 80s OSs are Pascal projects), Objective-C only disappeared because Apple introduced Swift. And the authors comment about COBOL being retired is untrue for anyone who’s worked on critical banking software.

I honestly think AI slop would have more value than this naive opinion piece.