I largely agree with the "programming languages are a communication technology [thus critical mass is critical]" bit, we spend more time reading and explaining code than we do writing it. That's why I'm really hopeful for Rust web frameworks like Loco to get to mainstream-ish.

There are just _so goddamn many_ webdevs that a reasonably popular web framework can bootstrap a language out of the mid-popularity uncanny valley. On the flipside, a lot of webdevs are interested in Rust, but aren't really personally set up to do some embedded or systems stuff, so the activation energy for a given developer getting into it remains slightly higher than other languages.