Erlang may be the sturgeon of the software world. It has survived since the Triassic and yet is somehow prized for specific use cases and discerning tastes.
It is nowhere near as ancient as sharks, nor as vicious, but it employs some new physiology, and can survive just as long.
But that was a very different world and it sticks out like an outsider, when really it's been there the whole time.
the story I like to use is -- "imagine a world where java never happened, where servers were abstracted into HA clusters automatically by your programming language, and where horizontal scaling was automatic and free"
It is nowhere near as ancient as sharks, nor as vicious, but it employs some new physiology, and can survive just as long.
But that was a very different world and it sticks out like an outsider, when really it's been there the whole time.
(sorry, this analogy got away from me a bit).