[rayiner]

> When I read about Smalltalk or Lisp or Haskell people regard them as the pinnacle of programming language design and yet their popularity isn't really proportional to those statements.

That's like saying you read about Bob Dylan being the pinnacle of songwriting, but his popularity compared to Beyonce not bearing that out.

[rch]

Or Tom Waits for that matter. I've heard more than a few people say it wasn't until a particular album, or or perhaps 10 or so years after their first attempt that they started to really 'get' Tom Waits. I've heard almost the same for a number of fundamentally great programming languages over the years too.

[tmikaeld]

A programming languages superiority is not all that matters.

Looking at the most popular ones - the learning usually sparks from necessity - setting up a blog and modifying it (Wordpress -> PHP), making a webpage interactive (jQuery -> Javascript).

From that necessity grows a community that creates libraries, classes, plugins, extensions, scripts, full frameworks and even servers (node.js).

This all makes it very hard to prioritize a language that doesn't have such easily accessible libraries, classes, plugins, extensions or frameworks readily available and it becomes even harder when there is a small community to gain knowledge from.

Talking from my own experience, when you are learning it is fun to create libraries, classes and plugins - but when you are up to your ears in real work a very small amount of time can be spent on creating content for the community.