Yes, there are different forces in a play.<p>Let&#x27;s name it as The Law of a Decent Runtime, and The Law of  Attention to Details, and The Law of a Bazar of Ignorant.))<p><i>The Law Of a Decent Runtime</i> is very simple - evolving a decent runtime is very costly and time-consuming. It is also  related to the second law and to the inverse of the third - which is a <i>the Law of Dictature of The Most Competent</i>. A decent runtime cannot be produced without talent, time, financing, competence and attention to details.<p>The examples are what came out of Xerox Parc, Bell labs, Ericsson and the best parts of academia (MIT Scheme culture, Scala, Standard ML, LLVM and Haskell, monads aside).<p>There are also many in-house (Tensorflow) and sponsored open source porjects (LLVM, Golang, Julia, Torch, to name a few).  Basically, it is about resources spent on a talent.<p>What is important distinction - a decent runtime cannot be produced by <i>the Bazaar of Ignorant</i> (PHP, amateur Java code, SAP, and other &quot;fractals of a bad design&quot;).<p>The Linux kernel is very special example, because it combines the law of big numbers, and all these three - it is a product of a whole planet of competent volunteers and paid developers - unlike PHP or Java ecosystem there is very high barrier to entry, thanks to <i>The Dictature of The Most Competent</i> .)<p><i>The law of Attention To Details</i> - is quite obvious, and related to the first. This is why most of successful projects had a passionate and competent leader who sets the standards, be it Linux kernel, Erlang, Nginx, Gambit Scheme, Python, OpenBSD, Redis, Scala, SBCL, PostgreSQL, you name it.<p>Popularity has nothing to do with it. It is based on the principle of instant gratification (PHP, MongoDB) or Availability Bias boosted by paid content brainwashing (Java, SAP, MS) without understanding and preferably any thinking. Popularity doesn&#x27;t mean quality at all, be it junkfood or PHP.