📝Languages become popular when they bring innovative runtime

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Language runtime

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Your Language Sucks, It Doesn’t Matter

The idea is that languages become popular when they bring unique runtime features. The language itself is secondary.

This makes sense, because languages are usually selected based on the environment and performance requirements.

• browser → JavaScript
• macOS → Swift (Objective-C previously)
• low-level → C
• static single-file binaries → Go

Java might be explained as non-dynamic cross-platform memory safe runtime (which was pretty unique at the time).

Exceptions not explained:

• scripting languages: why Python and PHP are popular and Ruby and Perl are not
• C++ and TypeScript (language evolution)