Languages less than 10 years old are still in their infancy. It's fairly common for the first 10 years of a language to be quite niche.
The Languages bought by large corporations can avoid that 10 years by making it used by decree, that can make it more popular sooner, but it doesn't guarantee long term success,
There is probably a language that exists today that will be a top 50 language in a decade or two that neither of us knows about. Time is one of the best design resources.
Typescript was Microsoft and Swift was Apple, so those follow the same pattern of Go and Rust.
10 years is enough time. The industry was absolutely using Perl (1987) in 1997 and I was using Python (1991) professionally by 2003.
I mentioned Zig already; Julia also feels like it fizzled in a similar way, by getting attention without commensurate adoption.
But I will concede that you're right about Lean. It feels important that it's solving tomorrow's problem (i.e. today's) rather than yesterday's problem.
Well there was perl 0 from I'm-not-sure-when before perl 1. Similarly Python started development in 1989. Mojo seems to be the most prominent of the new languages, but I suspect there are plenty of things out there waiting to catch on. I suspect there will be a generation of people who will have seen the advantages of Rust who will go on to attempt to write a language that keeps those advantages but doesn't invoke the trauma of Rust.
Things do go a little slower these days however. It was 5 years and one month between the release of the Vic-20 and the Amiga. How different is your computer to the one you had 5 years ago?
Languages less than 10 years old are still in their infancy. It's fairly common for the first 10 years of a language to be quite niche.
The Languages bought by large corporations can avoid that 10 years by making it used by decree, that can make it more popular sooner, but it doesn't guarantee long term success,
There is probably a language that exists today that will be a top 50 language in a decade or two that neither of us knows about. Time is one of the best design resources.