- Markdown beat Asciidoc
- Swagger beat RAML
- C++ beat D
- more
Each of these gained traction over the other, and each had things that made them less perfect than the other.
Markdown had vague or missing areas of specification that led to incompatible implementation. Swagger couldn't do everything, or did some things in multiple ways where RAML had a normalized syntax. D theoretically improved on C, and still lives on.
Markdown had more users, and more tooling.
Swagger had the Swagger UI.
C++ had Bjarne Stroustrup and tooling.
On the up-side, sometimes these stories come 'round again. Windows beat Mac... But Mac's still here and still gaining traction.
Maybe Clojure will be more popular than Go one day. Maybe we'll all chuck YAML for EDN or TOML. It could happen.