[gilch]

I think language popularity in industry mostly comes down to path dependence[1]. It doesn't say as much as you seem to think.

A few approaches got lucky in the rapid inflationary period of the personal computer revolution (C), and the advent of the Web (Javascript), and became deeply entrenched in industry, while superior alternatives that had been known for decades missed the boat. Industry languages still haven't caught up to where Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk, and APL were in the 1970's, but they are clearly (if slowly) trending in that direction.

APL and derivatives are still used extensively in finance, a highly competitive field, to say the least. That's where you find the jobs.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence