No one argues about the syntax, because everybody "wins" and gets their own syntax as a result, which is often held up as a key part of the explanation for why the Lisp family languages are wonderful and fun and mind-expanding and just awesome in every way... yet rarely escape from "niche" status and are yet to even threaten to break into the really top-tier languages.
Because languages like Rust and Go, and Python and Java and honestly almost every other non-Lisp family language, want more cohesion in their codebases, they need a different solution to the problem.
"I'd say fragmentation hurts retention, which only has secondary effect on adoption."
I have no idea how you come to that conclusion. Any conceivable model for adoption I can imagine is a differential equation which contains "current adoption" as a term going into the first derivative. If people are leaving a language faster than people are coming in (and I speak in general, not claiming this about any particular language), retention is going to have major effects on adoption and the lack thereof.
Yeah, but any language more popular than brainfuck has some level of adoption. Your language doesn't have to be super popular to start having adoptions issues.
No one argues about the syntax, because everybody "wins" and gets their own syntax as a result, which is often held up as a key part of the explanation for why the Lisp family languages are wonderful and fun and mind-expanding and just awesome in every way... yet rarely escape from "niche" status and are yet to even threaten to break into the really top-tier languages.
Because languages like Rust and Go, and Python and Java and honestly almost every other non-Lisp family language, want more cohesion in their codebases, they need a different solution to the problem.