Hmm?  You paid a huge tax in desktop development for writing in a language other than the one the OS was written in.  All of the platform documentation &amp; examples were in its &quot;native&quot; language.  You usually had to marshall data structures yourself to fit the data formats of the native language.  You had to write shims (oftentimes in assembly!) that would bridge the calling conventions of your preferred language to those that the frameworks were written in.<p>There&#x27;s a reason that C became the dominant language during the 80s and early 90s: it&#x27;s because Win32, UNIX, and MacOS &gt;=7 were all written in it.  That&#x27;s a large part of what Worse is Better was about.  Richard Gabriel founded a company to write software for Lisp Machines, pivoted it to run Lisp on commodity hardware, found that all of his customers would rather just write in C, pivoted it again to do a C++ dev environment, and eventually went out of business.<p>The renaissance for other languages was really during the web era, when everything just spit out HTML and it didn&#x27;t matter what the server was written in.  Once customers started demanding rich interactivity on the client, there was a strong incentive to write everything in Javascript, and then a strong incentive to write the servers in Javascript too, and then a strong incentive to use Javascript for other things like native apps and IoT devices too.