When you end your comment with, "Both Ruby and Python seem to be made to appeal to people originally," that comes across as a statement by implication that Racket was not made to appeal to people originally. Otherwise, why say it?
I guess my point was that Python and Ruby didn't really try to be more popular, people just used them. Racket seems the same, but for a smaller number of people. I'm wondering if marketing/trying to appeal to new people has ever been effective for an established programming language. I'm not aware of any examples where that worked.
> I'm wondering if marketing/trying to appeal to new people has ever been effective for an established programming language.
I'm not sure if this counts as "trying to appeal to new people" (or "an established language", for that matter) but the Rust community has made a big push towards creating more teaching materials that make the language more broadly accessible for the past ~5 years, and I think that's been effective.
I'd say that for Rust, being accessible was always in the DNA of the language, at least since it went public. It totally counts as "trying to appeal to new people", as lots of people that didn't use languages like C or C++ use Rust. However I don't think it works for the "established language" part. I'd say Rust is a good example of what to do if you're starting a new language.
