📝Some programming languages are popular because of the killer app/framework

source

Feldman₂₀₁₉

Some programming languages become popular when they bring a new killer app or handy framework. The popularity of such languages is tied to the popularity of the framework.

Example is Ruby and Ruby-on-rails.

For PHP, the first killer app was making HTML pages dynamic, now WordPress and Drupal.

C was basically the only high-level language for systems programming (other options were assembly and pascal).