A language needs an active community of many users. In these days, without support for libraries that make software exciting and useful a language can definitely die as a platform. Those are some of the many qualities that persuade users to invest time into learning a new language. Otherwise, they'll go with something already established.

So I disagree, there is definitely competition amongst programming languages.

That is not dead which may eternal lie, and in strange aeons even death may die. Remember that weird language that looked like Java and was used by nobody except script kiddies until the Web exploded? Or that quirky little language with forced indentation that was overshadowed by Perl and Matlab well into the 90s and the 00s? Open source projects don't have the same constraints as commercial ones, they can remain dormant or unnoticed for years before suddenly taking off.