I&#x27;ve always found it unfortunate how he, and others, implicitly define the <i>success</i> of a programming language as its <i>popularity</i>. A programming language can be incredibly interesting and useful to you and others without ever becoming fashionable—and that doesn&#x27;t mean it has failed!<p>I think there should be other metrics for success: a programming language can be useful <i>to a dedicated community of experts</i>, it can be useful <i>to a single company</i>, it can be great <i>for a single use-case</i> or even just great <i>for you</i>, it can push <i>novel ideas</i> or showcase a <i>novel design philosophy</i>, all without massive popularity or market success. (And it&#x27;s not like most languages directly make lots of money anyhow.)<p>Popularity is a poor proxy for quality, and quality matters all on its own.<p>Keeping this in mind changes a lot of his suggestions, I think.<p>Completely unrelated note: what the article calls &quot;lowering&quot; I&#x27;ve more commonly seen called &quot;desugaring&quot; and is, indeed, a powerful technique both in terms of <i>implementation</i> but also in terms of <i>understanding</i> a language—if a piece of syntax is pure sugar, you don&#x27;t have to understand anything new, just how the syntax it desugars to works.