>If paid support is all that counts then most languages would fall into that.

Can you name another recent programming language that wasn't developed in-house at a major company. Go , Dart , and Rust all started out with paid teams of programmers working on them.

Not sure if Crystal will be able to progress at a rate fast enough to keep people interested. Likewise, you'd have to be insane to try and pitch this to your project manager. I consider myself to be a risk taker, but even for my own side projects I stick to older better known programming languages.

it feels like we keep trying to solve the same problems over and over again instead of utilizing solutions which already exist

I feel like it would be easier and cheaper to negotiate a support contract with Manas (Crystal) than with Google (Go, Dart) if your company wants paid support.

Do zig, python, elisp, Clojure, Haskell (mostly a research project), etc fit the bill?

Out of those Pythons the only one that's widely used in production, and it's been around for a long time. Python itself is an extremely simple language, which I think can work as one person passion project.

Modern python has grown significantly from its first release in the 90s though. I don't think that can happen today, we all want too much out of our programming languages.

> Python itself is an extremely simple language

Unfortunately that’s not true at all - Python is far from simple. Sure, it’s no C++, but it’s very complex compared to languages like C, Go, Lua, even JavaScript.

All these companies, and more, are using Clojure in production: https://clojure.org/community/companies.

Python also has active sponsorship. Guido and the mypy folks were employed at Dropbox for the express purpose of working on Python last I checked, and even then my biggest grievance with Python is that the big hairy problems (performance, package management) still never get solved.

I can't speak to the others on the list but it seems odd to say Clojure isn't being used widely in production. Clojure's been powering big businesses for years now and Nubank, which primarily uses Clojure, is valued at $24bn: https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2021/brazilia....

Languages / ecosystems being immature is not a tautology. Every one is at some point immature, but it's not a self-defining attribute of a language, nor is it necessarily true for a given language. It's entirely fair to call out "this language does not have a significant, stable, healthy ecosystem behind it (yet?)" because dealing with that stands a pretty good chance of taking up a large amount of time. Some uses / users are fine with that, others are not.