A frustration I heard a lot from PL researchers is that popular languages today seemed to have gotten that way /despite/ their intrinsic values rather than because.
My stab at explaining that is some kind of take on a 'programmer demographic' factor.
The PC revolution (and rise of the killer micros) of the 80's caused a big democratization wave.
Before, languages were typically created by academics and industry professionals.
The newer languages listed come from hobbyists in the PL field: people who make some language for fun or for an immediate need, perhaps without full knowledge of the field's histories and implementation techniques.
With the democratization wave and the explosion in the need for skilled programmers, the population of programmers during the 90's and beyond is significantly less academically educated than in the preceding decades. That means that in a large part, the views of the PL research community does not matter as much anymore. What matters more is a type of darwinism of languages, where popularity within a niche of practitioners can be the springboard into broad popularity. It doesn't really matter than it gets lexical scoping wrong, or combines incompatible abstractions, or the hacky implementation is leaking into the language semantics. What matters more is that there are useful frameworks, editors and learning material online.
My stab at explaining that is some kind of take on a 'programmer demographic' factor.
The PC revolution (and rise of the killer micros) of the 80's caused a big democratization wave. Before, languages were typically created by academics and industry professionals. The newer languages listed come from hobbyists in the PL field: people who make some language for fun or for an immediate need, perhaps without full knowledge of the field's histories and implementation techniques.
With the democratization wave and the explosion in the need for skilled programmers, the population of programmers during the 90's and beyond is significantly less academically educated than in the preceding decades. That means that in a large part, the views of the PL research community does not matter as much anymore. What matters more is a type of darwinism of languages, where popularity within a niche of practitioners can be the springboard into broad popularity. It doesn't really matter than it gets lexical scoping wrong, or combines incompatible abstractions, or the hacky implementation is leaking into the language semantics. What matters more is that there are useful frameworks, editors and learning material online.