I don't think you can become a popular cross platform systems programming language without being pretty decent.

There is a lose correlation between quality and popularity, but being the most popular language is in no way indicative of being the best language (as the person I responded to was saying).

I agree. I've ran across a few obscure languages I thought would be barren, but found they had exciting new developments happening. It made me realized there's a big difference between the number of language contributors and the number of language users. Most are language users, like myself, who glue a few libraries together and write a little business logic and call myself a programmer. Whereas a language contributor (as I call them) create libraries, development tools, etc. I've wondered if the number of language contributors is roughly equal, within an order of magnitude, across most languages, even the obscure ones. Language contributors add quality to the language, language users (again, myself) don't.

Well I guess the problem with "best" is that you have to ask: best for what? Looking pretty? Running fast? Being elegant? Being maintainable? Getting Shit Done(tm)?

Yeah, it's a kinda vacuous statement I guess :o)