What I am stating is that to re-write existing systems, regardless how rotten they might be, someone needs to pay for the work to happen.

What many tend to forget on those "X re-written in Y" posts.

Pay Per Hour * Total Hours Effort = Money Spent on Rewrite

Additionally what I am saying is that languages that come with the OS SDK have first class privileges and experience shows that 99% of the companies won't look elsewhere.

For example, in commercial UNIX days, you would get C and C++ compilers as part of the base SDK. The vendors that had support for additional languages like Ada, had them as additional modules.

So any dev wanting to push for language X needed to make a case why the company needed to put extra money on the table instead of going with what they already got.

A similar process happens on mobile and Web platforms nowadays, you either go with what is available out of the box or try to shoehorn an external toolchain and then deal with all integration issues and additional development costs ($$$) that might arise.

Many many free software projects are started by people who don't get paid for it. Those people start their project in whatever language they want. If someone wants to write webserver software in Java or an OS in Object Pascal, they can do it.

Successful projects may get financial support from companies later. I doubt that these companies are overly selective towards "obviously bad languages". I don't buy that there are any mechanisms in place to get cynic or outraged about. Maybe it _is_ just that some languages are more productive.