Yes, any new language needs to start somewhere, but it’s interesting to think we need new languages for existing domains and that they have any chance of success to begin with.

Consider that by many accounts JavaScript, Java, and Python basically dominate in terms of number of developers and mindshare. These languages all arrived 25-30 years ago. I know some rankings claim C/C++ are far more popular than JavaScript but I just haven’t seen evidence of that in recent years.

Other widely used languages include C, Objective-C, C++, C# and Ruby. The first three are older than the aforementioned languages, and Ruby is from the same era as Java/JavaScript, and C# isn’t far behind that.

In terms of newer languages, the only ones I can think of offhand that seem to have serious traction are Swift and to a lesser extent Go. Some people might throw Kotlin in there, but I’m not sure how much actual traction it’s getting. Rust has been gaining traction slowly for ~8+ years and I’m hopeful it has a bright future but I don’t see a lot of actual projects using it today.

The point is that it’s really hard to succeed if your primary reason to exist is to make existing practice slightly better. It’s very hard to displace any of the existing languages in the space of general purpose programming.

You need to have libraries. You need to have at least syntax coloring support for several editors. You need language server support for VS Code. You need to generate Dwarf. You probably need a repl or website that allows interactively playing around with the language to get people started. You need enough mindshare that teams can actually hire from a pool of candidates once they get a project underway. You need a compiler with good diagnostics, books, StackOverflow answers for the top N questions people will run into, bloggers who are enthusiastic, etc.

Someone posted this on HN recently and I think the speaker does a good job of breaking down the challenges and examining why some languages have found success while others (notably functional languages) have languished on the sidelines:

Why isn’t functional programming the norm? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4