> And the rest of those basically had no competition in their domain when they started 30+ years ago.
That's not true, as anyone who was programming back then (like me) knows. Java had serious competition from VB, Delphi, and a host of other "RAD" languages as they were called back then (and not long before, the language that the magazines were touting as "the future" was Smalltalk). All of them were heavily marketed. C++, of course, had to compete against an established incumbent, C, and another strong contender, Ada (Ada, BTW, was about as popular in 1990, when it was 10 years old, as Rust is today, although bigger, more important software projects were being written in Ada in 1990 than are being written in Rust today). Python and Ruby both were both competing with the very powerful incumbent, Perl. PHP, of course, had Java to compete with, as did C#. Some of these languages had strong backers, but some started out as very small operations (Python, C++, PHP), and some languages with very strong backers did poorly (Delphi, FoxPro).
Again, I have no idea if Rust will ever really take off, but its adoption at this advanced age, despite no lack of marketing, would be extraordinarily low for a language that becomes very popular.
> But it doesn't help that Rust is also in the native space, whose devs are especially stubborn
Perhaps, but Fortran, C, and C++, were all in this space and they all spread rather quickly. Microsoft, a company with a fondness for complicated languages, chose to write significant portions of their flagship OS in C++ when the language was only five years old.
It's true that the market share of low-level languages has been shrinking for several decades now and continues to shrink, but also isn't really a good news for a language that for at least a decade has been trying to get a significant share of that shrinking market, and has been having a hard time at that.
> and is a difficult language with painful syntax.
Yes, but this, too, isn't a point in favour of betting on Rust's future success. Other difficult or complex languages indeed had a harder time getting much adoption in their first decade, but things also didn't pick up for them in their second decade.
The latest bloomer of the bunch is Python, but if Rust ever becomes very popular (even as popular as C++ is today), it would need to break Python's record. That's not impossible, but it would be highly unusual. Low adoption in the first decade has virtually always been a predictor of low adoption down the line, too.
That's not true, as anyone who was programming back then (like me) knows. Java had serious competition from VB, Delphi, and a host of other "RAD" languages as they were called back then (and not long before, the language that the magazines were touting as "the future" was Smalltalk). All of them were heavily marketed. C++, of course, had to compete against an established incumbent, C, and another strong contender, Ada (Ada, BTW, was about as popular in 1990, when it was 10 years old, as Rust is today, although bigger, more important software projects were being written in Ada in 1990 than are being written in Rust today). Python and Ruby both were both competing with the very powerful incumbent, Perl. PHP, of course, had Java to compete with, as did C#. Some of these languages had strong backers, but some started out as very small operations (Python, C++, PHP), and some languages with very strong backers did poorly (Delphi, FoxPro).
Again, I have no idea if Rust will ever really take off, but its adoption at this advanced age, despite no lack of marketing, would be extraordinarily low for a language that becomes very popular.
> But it doesn't help that Rust is also in the native space, whose devs are especially stubborn
Perhaps, but Fortran, C, and C++, were all in this space and they all spread rather quickly. Microsoft, a company with a fondness for complicated languages, chose to write significant portions of their flagship OS in C++ when the language was only five years old.
It's true that the market share of low-level languages has been shrinking for several decades now and continues to shrink, but also isn't really a good news for a language that for at least a decade has been trying to get a significant share of that shrinking market, and has been having a hard time at that.
> and is a difficult language with painful syntax.
Yes, but this, too, isn't a point in favour of betting on Rust's future success. Other difficult or complex languages indeed had a harder time getting much adoption in their first decade, but things also didn't pick up for them in their second decade.
The latest bloomer of the bunch is Python, but if Rust ever becomes very popular (even as popular as C++ is today), it would need to break Python's record. That's not impossible, but it would be highly unusual. Low adoption in the first decade has virtually always been a predictor of low adoption down the line, too.