Recognizing that there's a special power in resilient technologies. Those that keep chugging along decade after decade, and getting stronger, too. Not from inertia or monopolist effects or other kinds of random lock-in. But because they tackle a certain set of fundamental problems very, very well. Despite endless complaints about their fundamental limitations, conceptual flaws or alleged lack of scalability.
SQL, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and many aspects of Unix and the C/Make toolchain all come to mind.
Mind you, I don't like all of the above. At least 2 in particular I definitely wouldn't mind seeing "just go away."
But I do recognize that they have special staying power. And they didn't get this power by accident.
This is certainly not true. Evolution of programming languages is circumstantial. There are many flaws in all of the ones you had listed.
The marginal cost of deprecating something or breaking something is higher than the incremental cost of workarounds. This happens all the time from the laryngeal nerve in Giraffe to the evolution of a programming language, say JavaScript.
Please don’t mix good design with popularity. It’s a correlation/causation fallacy.
I never claimed that evolution “designs” something. In fact, I’m talking about the opposite - Evolution has no hindsight. Therefore, the marginal cost of undoing something is larger than incrementally adding or bolting on fixes.
SQL, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and many aspects of Unix and the C/Make toolchain all come to mind.
Mind you, I don't like all of the above. At least 2 in particular I definitely wouldn't mind seeing "just go away."
But I do recognize that they have special staying power. And they didn't get this power by accident.