>>27
Languages ride a meme-wave to fame, usually.
Lisp rose and fell with the AI industry.
C came along Unix, Unix came along minicomputers, and both actually filled a niche.
C++ came to be from the OO craze and the mess of C code everyone got themselves into.
Java came from people realizing their mistake in going with Sepples coupled with Sun's ample publicity campaign.
Javascript is only heard of because the Web is stuck with it.
PHP rose to popularity due to the faults of the CGI tools of the time, and now it's a magnet for retards, for which there will always be a market.
Perl, inheriting its hype from Unix, created a market for both FIOC and Ruby, and was displaced by both after people grew weary of its bullshit.
Ada actually had its wave of hype, but it sank before it reached the shore. See this newsgroup posting:
https://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/msg/934d6ce5bca490c4?hl=en
Maybe it could be hyped again now that people have their eyes on concurrency and type safety, having both being priorities in Ada's design. It's very of old-fashioned (and more cumbersome than it'd need to be today) at both, though.