This is based on a mountain of false assumptions. Just a few of them:
• Most people choose a language based on quality rather than what everyone else is using
• Good languages are necessarily well known (if you build it, they will come?)
• Large corporations, which make up a large segment of the market and can basically anoint programming languages to dominance, have the ability or inclination to choose a good programming language (rather than, e.g., a language which has a strong promotional machine behind it or a language whose backer offers lots of enterprise support)
• Attractiveness to amateurs is equal to all other factors in determining a programming language's quality (regardless of what you think of the language, this is a large part of PHP's popularity)
The thesis here is simply false for any reasonable definition of "good." The only way you can make it true is to "#define good popular", in which case it's tautological.
For example, the reason there is still so much COBOL in production is not that the language is awesome and people choose it of their own free will — in fact, the opposite is generally considered to be the case even by COBOL experts — it's simply entrenched. These systems would not be written in COBOL if they were being developed today, but because they happen to have been written in COBOL's heyday, people still use COBOL. The market chooses COBOL for these positions because of the horrific cost of rewriting everything from the ground-up, not because of anything related to COBOL itself.
• Most people choose a language based on quality rather than what everyone else is using
• Good languages are necessarily well known (if you build it, they will come?)
• Large corporations, which make up a large segment of the market and can basically anoint programming languages to dominance, have the ability or inclination to choose a good programming language (rather than, e.g., a language which has a strong promotional machine behind it or a language whose backer offers lots of enterprise support)
• Attractiveness to amateurs is equal to all other factors in determining a programming language's quality (regardless of what you think of the language, this is a large part of PHP's popularity)
The thesis here is simply false for any reasonable definition of "good." The only way you can make it true is to "#define good popular", in which case it's tautological.
For example, the reason there is still so much COBOL in production is not that the language is awesome and people choose it of their own free will — in fact, the opposite is generally considered to be the case even by COBOL experts — it's simply entrenched. These systems would not be written in COBOL if they were being developed today, but because they happen to have been written in COBOL's heyday, people still use COBOL. The market chooses COBOL for these positions because of the horrific cost of rewriting everything from the ground-up, not because of anything related to COBOL itself.