http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXwnk8Cr0c
I do not understand the Medium authors definition of "success". I get similarly confused when web commentators use the term "won" (e.g., language X "won") when discussing programming languages. Won what?
IMO, the presenter (RIP) was quite successful. Im sure Ada "won" many contracts.
See: Java wining enterprise programming; Python winning DevOps scripting; FORTRAN wining numerical simulation way back.
Also see: PHP winning SMB web consulting in the 90s (resulting in e.g. the Wordpress plugin ecosystem); RoR winning SMB web consulting in the 00s (resulting in the the current “horizontally scale by running more containers with a load-balancer in front” approach to web-app deployment, due mostly to Ruby’s horrible concurrency story at the time); Node.js winning SMB web consulting in the [first half of the] 10s (resulting in the rise of websocket-driven SPAs and a million Node build tools.)
Maybe "hyped" success is sometimes confused with "real" success. The later type may not always be as visible.
He addresses this in the lecture. He suggests people often make statements about programming language usage in industry without actual knowledge of what some organizations are really using (beyond what is announced publicly, or hyped).