"What I came to understand, after years of work on Common Lisp and the death of Dylan, the ongoing popularity of the hideous C++, and the rise of Java, is that programming languages don't become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility. ... [T]he best languages very rarely take over, if ever. Some language starts being used because it has the backing of some big company or project, people doing similar things use it as well, positive feedback sets in, and soon it is the language everyone is using. Java is an example -- not nearly as good as Lisp on many dimensions, but it appeared at the right time for a language with some good properties for creating downloadable Internet apps. And it had the backing of Sun Microsystems, at a time when Sun was powerful. So Java became mainstream, while Common Lisp and Dylan faded away."
:-(