Programming Language Popularity

Programming language popularity works like fashion, but not because developers are shallow and finicky. It's because it's actually important what other developers are using. You could have the best programming language ever, but libraries, resources, help, and advice won't exist until you have a lot of people using it. There's enough adventurous programmers to bootstrap this cycle with new languages, but the general principle holds.

Isn't this the only way a programming language can gain wide adoption now?

This was an issue way before ChatGPT, because older languages have more online resources, more experienced developers, more libraries, and are more battle-tested and hardened. It’s why JavaScript and FORTRAN (!) are still alive today, and you rarely hear about new languages gaining mass adoption. The newest “production” languages today (Dart, Go, Rust, Swift, Kotlin) are all not actually new (some started being developed 10+ years ago), not as widely-used as their replacements (React, C, C++, Ob

Languages without a big tech company behind do not get popular, all the popular new languages ahve big companies behind Rust,Go,TypeScript

This sounds amazing, why there is no more traction for the language? What are the downsides?

Killer app is the wrong phrase. Rather every new language needs a competitive upside over existing languages to be successful. At which point your proposed questions have easy answers.

Is there a popular language without investment from tech giants?

It's very difficult for languages to "escape the lab" as it's often put. I'd say the biggest factors are:- Developers are often reluctant to learn new tools.- Project managers are reluctant to use new languages, seeing a small community as a risk.- Academic projects have different priorities than industry. Implementations done by academic teams often need substantial work before they meet industry needs.This boils down to visible necessity. Without that, it's difficult for a language

In my opinion, the reason it and other languages aren't more popular is that they don't have a "halo" product that forces you to use it.For example look at Elisp. It might be the most successful lisp in the modern Era because of Emacs. Emacs alone is like over a million lines of Elisp, and the ecosystem of packages is gigantic. A lot of people do not like Elisp, and there have been many attempts to create Emacs + a better language (Guilemacs, First/Second Climacs). Bu

Yes, I imagine, because it's a relatively new language. In case of other ones the reasons are probably of entirely different nature.