[pron]

> C came out in 1972 and didn't gain its current dominance until approximately the release of the ANSI C spec in 1989/1990

While it kept growing in popularity later, by 1983-5 C was already one of the top programming langugages in the world.

> C++ came out in 1985 and didn't become the dominant language for gamedev until the late 90s

Major parts of Windows and Office were being written in C++ in the early-mid 90s, before C++ turned 10. Visual C++, one of Microsoft's flagship development products, came out in 1993. Huge mission-critical, long-term, industrial and defence projects were being written in C++ during or before 1995 (I was working on such a project).

> Python came out in 1991 and labored as an obscure Perl alternative until the mid-late 2000s

Even in 2002 Python was widespread as a scripting language. But it is, indeed, the best and possibly only example of a late bloomer language.

> Javascript came out in 1995 and was treated as a joke and/or afterthought in the broader programming discourse until Node.js came out in 2009

AJAX (popularised by Gmail) pretty much revolutionised the web in 2004. When jQuery came out in 2006, JS was all over the place.

[kibwen]

> Major parts of Windows and Office were being written in C++ in the early-mid 90s, before C++ turned 10.

Major parts of Windows, Android, and Linux were being written in Rust before it turned 10. Major parts of AWS were being written in Rust before it turned 4. Major parts of Dropbox were being written in Rust before it turned 1. So you agree by your own criteria that Rust is a major language?

> While it kept growing in popularity later, by 1983-5 C was already one of the top programming langugages in the world.

In the mid-80s, C still had plenty of major and healthy competitors, as pjmlp will imminently arrive to remind you. By the criteria of mid-80s C, Rust is already one of the top programming languages in the world.

> AJAX (popularised by Gmail) pretty much revolutionised the web in 2004. When jQuery came out in 2006, JS was all over the place.

No, despite the existence and availability of freestanding interpreters (e.g. Rhino), Javascript was an also-ran everywhere except the web; which is to say, nobody was choosing to use Javascript except the people forced at gunpoint to use it. There are infinitely more people choosing to use Rust at the age of 11 than were choosing to use Javascript at the age of 11, which means that, once again, by your criteria, you must consider Rust a major language. You can just admit it instead of being a tsundere.

[pron]

> So you agree by your own criteria that Rust is a major language?

No, because I was merely responding to your specific points and the extent is nowhere near the same. C++ had a huge market share before it turned 10. In the late nineties I was working on a critical air traffic control system, first used in 1995, written half in Ada half in C++. Around 1995-6 C++ was already ubiquitous in serious software.

> In the mid-80s, C still had plenty of major and healthy competitors, as pjmlp will imminently arrive to remind you.

He doesn't need to remind me because I was there. Yes, there were major competitors, yet C was already very near the top.

> Javascript was an also-ran everywhere except the web

That's pretty much where it is today, yet it's still #1 (if we count TS as part of JS).

> There are infinitely more people choosing to use Rust at the age of 11 than were choosing to use Javascript at the age of 11

The number of people using Rust professionally is a fraction of that of any of the languages we mentioned, plus many more (C#, PHP, Ruby, Go, Kotlin) at the same age. It's more similar to Ada's adoption at that age in size (of course, there wasn't much small OSS projects then at all, let alone written in Ada, but there were many more big, mission- and even safety-critical systems being written in Ada at that age than in Rust). Is it a serious language? Absolutely! But so far its trajectory doesn't resemble that of any language that's achieved wide popularity.