Is it just me, or does it seem like worse languages get more usage than better ones? Like, how many people know Haskell vs. Python? A lot of people dislike JavaScript, but why is it so damn popular then? And why didn't presumably superior Dart replaced it on the web, even with Google's support and lobbying?

I think the reason is that every language has vocal critics, and when a lot of people use a language, there will be a lot of such critics. When a certain critical mass (no pun intended) is accumulated, it begins to look like everything you can read online is bad things. Of course, the language being worse than some other hip language doesn't help.

What do you think?

Languages with low barriers to entry will tend to be perceived as "worse" because of the kind of people who use them.

If a program is written in Haskell then the people who wrote it are seriously smart or they wouldn't have been able to get started.

If it's written in C#, then it could have been created by more or less anyone.

Not sure that's a fault of the language though.

I respect that developers take their tools seriously, they want to create great products that scale, are easy to maintain and secure etc etc, but sometimes the constant search for the holy grail of tools (languages in this case) falls more under dogma than anything else and they start becoming religious about the tools they use.

Google included Dart in a chromium browser a long time ago iirc when it was poised to become the new defacto language for modern browsers, heck, they even included an actual IDE with it. But the adoption of JS for browsers was far too big, and the number of web apps/sites that use it are just too large to constitute a shift for a better tool.

Haskell is just too complex for the average developer that just wants to get shit done and collect a paycheck.

In my opinion, the holy grail of dynamic/fast iteration/garbage collected/multi-paradigm programming language already existed in the form of Common Lisp. But the world was not and isn't ready for it yet

@AleCx04 couldn't agree more