[greggirwin]

Another way to look at it is that you need a reason for people to use your language, not features. C didn't have tooling to start, JS didn't have an ecosystem, VSCode is only a few years old, so there is the short view, and the long view. It's nice if you live long enough to see your work appreciated, and perhaps even benefit from it. Think true artist versus imitator. Engineers would say "Design for what people think they want, based on what they've seen before, or design for what people need, but they don't know it yet."

Familiarity helps, which is why so many langs follow historical syntactic and semantic rules; and what makes it hard on languages that are either different themselves, or target a niche domain. This includes languages whose paradigm is harder for mere mortals (the vast majority of us) to grasp.

There is also luck and timing. Backing from a big company doesn't hurt, but those langs (Swift and Go) were designed for their owners needs, not everybody else's.

There is a great irony here, which is that many lessons from the past have been forgotten, and ideas which would have help us as developers, and therefore the world, aren't widely used.

Clio doesn't look like my particular cup of tea, but they're trying to solve important problems, and I support them in that.