John Ousterhout made this interesting observation regarding Lisp in 1994:
Language designers love to argue about why this language or that language
must be better or worse a priori, but none of these arguments really
matter a lot. Ultimately all language issues get settled when users vote
with their feet.
If [a language] makes people more productive then they will use
it; when some other language comes along that is better (or if it is
here already), then people will switch to that language. This is The
Law, and it is good. The Law says to me that Scheme (or any other Lisp
dialect) is probably not the "right" language: too many people have
voted with their feet over the last 30 years.
http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html
