My current perception:
-
Your mainstream business prefers to have a cheap and ready resource pool to hire from. To some decision makers the difference between programming languages isn’t apparent. And in the short term programming languages are just a tool - but not choosing the right tool for the job can have long term consequences. I think the most relevant anecdote is Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages (Y Store now C++, Why was Yahoo! Stores rewritten in C++/Perl from Lisp?). Lisp enabled Graham to manage Viaweb with minimal resources because he had the right resources (including himself). Yahoo converted it - they already had C++/Perl expertise and knew how to hire for it.
-
People need to make a living. If they decide to go into software development (the money can be good) they want to be as marketable as possible. So they focus on skills that have the most job openings (i.e. skills that businesses want to have in cheap and ready supply).
-
Education systems bow to the pressure of demand from both the employers and the prospective employees. Make them “productive”/“marketable” with the least amount of fuss, as they do have their business/lives to get on with. MIT’s first programming course was once based on SICP with Scheme - seems now Python has made inroads.
-
If you view coding as “just your job” the one language mentality can be pretty attractive. This continues to feed the investment in established languages like C#, Java, Python because by now there already is a humongous established codebase that needs maintaining. I also suspect that “one language” is the primary driver behind isomorphic JavaScript, i.e. the adoption of Node.js as a server-side technology.
-
Edit: In some organizations “successful” software developers are expected to move into management. This can lead to a situation where the people doing the work haven’t had much time to flesh out their skill sets, while the people managing them aren’t keeping up with the options.
