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My point with mentioning Plan 9 was that even with luminaries such as Rob Pike, success is not guaranteed. Having a huge organization backing you doesn’t hurt. (Ok, granted, plan 9 had bell labs but I posit a research arm is altogether different from the commercial entity that is google.)



It's interesting you bring Plan 9 up, because it was closed source for a long time, who knows if it was long enough to kill interest. Probably another factor for success.


I got that. I was saying there were a lot of other mitigating circumstances that contributed towards Plan 9’s lack of success that would be specific to Plan 9 and thus not relevant to general purpose programming languages. So it’s not really a great example.

I do think your general point does have merit and the computer industry is littered with examples of great languages that have either failed to gain traction or just fallen out of favour for whatever reason.




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