smalltalkcoder

I disagree. Many languages are technically excellent, but not gaining much mind share. They languish in the job market. For example, at Indeed, Clojure has 393 job postings, Elixir has 430, F# has 156, Haskell has 419, Julia has 706, Lua has 562, and Nim has 81. These are for the U.S. at the time of writing.

Python has 76,979 job postings, Java has 72,743, and even lowly Perl has 14,802. Technical merit is not enough; those lesser languages need marketing.

The fact is, language adoption in the IT industry is very much a matter of luck, fad and fashion.

There's nothing sneaky about it. Right at the start of the third paragraph, it says: "I’m a Smalltalk evangelist and Pharo is one of these languages."

The author is presenting one example, and pointing to a Pharo programming competition as the key exhibit. It's a pretty impressive competition, too. Impressive prizes. Impressive competition map and Pac-Man style game.

In fact, if you look around the same blog, you'll find a nice comparison to another competition called Battlesnake: https://smalltalk.tech.blog/2020/03/03/battlesnake-the-compe.... JRMPC seems to be a cut above.