A necessary ingredient for success is that a language is created by people who have specific and clear ideas about what they want from a new language [1], _and_ have the expertise to implement them. Everyone wants a fast, extensible, conscise, safe etc language [insert favorite features here], but very few people have the expertise to create one that improves on existing languages.
[1] http://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia Also, this is hard to accept, but languages succeed and fail partly for random or trivial reasons. Timing also matters: a language may fail because the existing technology is not yet ready for it (think of implementing Julia before LLVM), or succeed because they are the first language to scratch a particular itch, or fail because the niche they want to occupy is filled, etc. It is always tempting to rationalize the outcome ex post with a technical explanation (speed, syntax choices, features, etc), but I doubt that languages succeed and fail purely on their technical merits. Julia seems to be filling a vacuum in the scientific community. It is fast (Fortran/C), yet interactive/user-friendly (R/Matlab/Octave), and is available for free (which not only saves the cost of a license, but also the overhead of negotiating/upgrading/keeping track of them, and the pain of discovering that your code won't run on your coauthor's machine unless you get buy another license etc). I don't know Seed7, but I wonder why you consider it a relevant benchmark for comparison. On Wed, Oct 05 2016, Páll Haraldsson wrote: > A. > I just [re?]discovered Seed7 language, one of the few languages with > multiple dispatch, also extensible (not though macros). > > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.programming/_C08U8t4dRg > "Seed7 has more then 90 libraries now." [in 2013, after 7 years] > > They hit Top100 (93? top) on TIOBE, but nowhere to be found now. > > They seem very similar, except for Pascal like syntax, I guess there must > be more to it.. > > > B. > Chapel can be faster than Go or competitive, but also much slower (is a > parallel language, not sure if not working/meant to work always..): > > http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/chapel.html > > fasta > <http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php?test=fasta> > > > source secs KB gz cpu cpu load > Chapel > <http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?test=fasta&lang=chapel&id=1> > 20.59 > 28,868 1216 20.59 100% 0% 0% 1% > Go > <http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?test=fasta&lang=go&id=3> > 1.97
