Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail

Andrew Oram wrote a two-part series for the Linux Professional Institute asking why programming languages rise and fall (parts one and two .) It says, roughly, that C, C++, and JavaScript are immortal (for now!), with Java a maybe; COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, and Perl lived respectable lives and got sent upstate to retire on a farm; Pascal, Objective-C, PL/I, Ada, and Tcl were false starts, with Ruby somewhere on the bubble. It's a good tour from a man who has been editing this industry's books forever, and near the end of it, Oram quotes Simon Peyton Jones, who observes that a language's adoption is "very weakly connected to its technical merits," and that the social and economic factors do the actual deciding.