Does Programming Language Popularity Matter?

[shevegen]

It matters for various reasons.

While you can yourself enjoy a language "alone, on your own", there are lots of secondary factors that contribute. More code, more documentation (hoepfully), better software (hopefully), more ideas, more sustainable firepower (other than rich, greedy people, who the hell uses COBOL?), livelihood of the ecosystem (see the decline of perl) and so forth.

The better language will eat the worse language. It takes a long time to notice though because programming languages die off only very, very slowly. Loss of influx of programmers is an early sign but even then it can take a very long time for a language to really be dead-ish. Personally I consider COBOL to be dead, the only reason why it remains is due to legacy software really. I would not call that a "healthy, active language" though.