I'm curious, do you have figures for this? I was not around when C or C++ were 10, but I was when python was and as a long time python user I would say that the pycommunity was much smaller at 10 then the rust community at 10. So my gut feeling is that your statement is false at least wrt python, but I'm happy to change my mind if you have sound data.
Edit: just to add some more anecdotal evidence from my memory of languages I used: java community was pretty bigger than rust at 10. Go's was much smaller than rust at 10. I'd be happy to check my beliefs against actual data :)
I wasn't programming yet when C was 10 years old, but I was when C++ was 10 years old (1995), and its adoption was an order of magnitude higher than Rust's is today.
I agree that of all popular languages, Python is the latest bloomer, but while it became popular for applications and data processing rather late, it was used a lot for scripting well before then.
> Go's was much smaller than rust at 10
Go turned 10 (if we want to count from 1.0) only 3 years ago, and Go's adoption in 2022 was much bigger than Rust's today.
I don’t have a dog in this race but I was also around at that time and one reason is there was far less choice in 1995 about where you would go from C. C++ was also a vastly simpler language back then (no templates, no exceptions, barely a few hundred command line options). So I am not sure what its adoption then can teach us about language adoption now.
I don't think it's true there was far less choice in 1995. Around that time (a few years later) I was working on a project that was half Ada half C++, and there were a few more exotic choices around. Aside from those, and C, there were still projects in the company back then written in Fortran and even in Jovial. At university, I learnt Esterel for formally-verified embedded software. And that's not even touching on the higher level space, where VB, Delphi, some Smalltalk, and a large selection of other "RAD tools" were being used (my first summer job was on what today would be called an ERP system written in a language called Business Basic). At university, the language I was taught at intro to compsi was Scheme (that was also the embedded-scrpting language we used at work). We were also taught ML and a bit of Haskell.
It's true that not many languages that seemed a reasonable choice at the time survived to this day as reasonable choices.
Edit: just to add some more anecdotal evidence from my memory of languages I used: java community was pretty bigger than rust at 10. Go's was much smaller than rust at 10. I'd be happy to check my beliefs against actual data :)