[goto11]

Yeah, we geeks like to think the concepts and technical design of a language in itself is what makes or breaks it. But JavaScript could have been similar to BASIC or it could have been similar to Scheme - people would have grumbled but used it regardless. Objective-C was considered a pretty obscure niche language until the iPhone made it mainstream.

The article cites fragmentation as the reason Lisp didn't become mainstream. But consider SQL - a severely fragmented language. Each implementation have major incompatibilities with every other. But it is still ubiquitous and rules its niche.