[tialaramex]

Your hypothetical "factor of ten" market share growth requirement means it's literally impossible for all the big players to achieve this since they presumably have more than 10% market share and such a "factor of ten" increase would mean they somehow had more than the entire market. When declaring success for a model because it predicted that a literally impossible thing wouldn't happen I'd suggest that model is actually worthless. We all knew that literally impossible things don't happen, confirming that doesn't validate the model.

Lets take your Fortran "example". What market share did Fortran have, according to you, in say 1959? How did you measure this? How about in 1965? Clearly you're confident, unlike Fortran's programmers, users and standards committee, that it was all over by 1966. Which is weird (after all that's when Fortran 66 comes into the picture), but I guess once I see how you calculate these outputs it'll make sense right?

[pron]

> means it's literally impossible for all the big players to achieve this

Only because they've achieved that 10% in their first decade or so, but what I said is the case for all languages, big and small alike (and Rust doesn't have this problem because it needs a 10x boost to approach C++'s current market share, which is already well below its peak). But the precise numbers don't matter. You can use 5x and it would still be true for most languages. The point is that languages - indeed, all technologies, especially in a competitive market - reach or approach their peak market share relatively quickly.

You make it sound like a novel or strange theory, but it's rather obvious when you look at the history. And the reason is that if a technology offers a big competitive advantage, it's adopted relatively quickly as people don't want to fall behind the competition. And while a small competitive advantage could hypothetically translate to steady, slow growth, what happens is that over that time, new alternatives show up and the language loses the novelty advantage without ever having gained a big-player advantage.

That's why, as much as I like, say, Clojure (and I like it a lot), I don't expect to see much future growth.

> Clearly you're confident, unlike Fortran's programmers

Yes, because I have the benefit of hindsight. Also, note that I'm not saying anything about decline (which happens both quickly and slowly), only that technologies in a competitive market reach or approach their peak share quickly. Fortran clearly became the dominant language for its domain in under a decade.

But anyway, if you think that steady slow growth is a likelier or more common scenario than fast growth - fine. I just think that thesis is very hard to support.

[tialaramex]

> The point is that languages - indeed, all technologies, especially in a competitive market - reach or approach their peak market share relatively quickly.

This predicts nothing in particular, for any outcome we can squint at this and say it was fulfilled, so in this sense it's actually worse than the XKCD cartoon.

It's not that it's a novel or strange theory, it's just wrong.

> if a technology offers a big competitive advantage, it's adopted relatively quickly as people don't want to fall behind the competition

Yeah, no. See, humans have a strong preference for the status quo so it isn't enough that some technology "offers a big competitive advantage", they'd usually just rather not actually. Lots of decision makers read Google's "Move Fast and Fix Things" and went "Yeah, that's not applicable to us [for whatever reason]" and moved on. It doesn't matter whether they were right to decide it wasn't applicable, it only matters whether their competitors reach a different conclusion and execute effectively.

[pron]

> It's not that it's a novel or strange theory, it's just wrong.

Okay. Can you provide an example of a language that steadily and gradually grew in popularity over a long time (well over a decade) and that this slow growth was the lion share of its market size growth? You say "it's just wrong" but I think it applies to 100% of cases, and if you want to be specific when it comes to numbers, then even languages whose market share has grown by a factor of 5 after age 10 is a small minority, and even a factor of 2 is a minority.

> Yeah, no. See, humans have a strong preference for the status quo so it isn't enough that some technology "offers a big competitive advantage", they'd usually just rather not actually.

Except, again, all languages, successful and unsuccessful alike, have approached their peak market share in their first decade or so. You can quibble over what I mean by "approach" but remember that Rust, at age 10+, needs to grow its market share by a factor of 10 to even match C++'s already-diminished market share today.