Why Programming Languages Die: It's Not About Technical Merit

Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail

Andrew Oram's series for the Linux Professional Institute sorts languages into immortal, respectable, and failed, but the real insight comes from Simon Peyton Jones: adoption is weakly tied to technical merit. This piece argues that languages die when they make one of three human needs—vocation, art, or job—needlessly difficult. JavaScript survives despite being an art failure; Objective-C thrived until Swift arrived; COBOL persists only because replacement is costly. The distinction between difficulty that pays off (C++, Rust) and friction that doesn't (Ada, COBOL) explains why some hard languages thrive and others fade.