[jcranmer]

The usual answer here, as several of my sibling comments have pointed out, is that popularity and quality are not necessarily correlated. Since this has already been discussed, I won't delve further.

Another answer that hasn't been discussed much is that... maybe it isn't better for development. The article discusses one way in which this could be true: that technical superiority essentially leads to a hopeless community fragmentation that more or less forces it to be inferior in terms of community effects (which are, presumably, more important for commercial development rather than individual development).

A different facet, though, is that I believe the better language isn't the one that gives you more powerful tools to write correct code, but the one that keeps you from writing incorrect code (while still letting you write correct code). A salient example here is goto. Most modern languages don't have the goto keyword anymore, but they instead retain things like break, continue, and early routine... all of which are restricted forms of goto. By using only these restricted forms instead of the general form, it is much easier to immediately see what the code is doing (and presumably quicker to understand why), even though it may strictly be less powerful.