1. The other technologies are evolving to take parts of kdb+ that made it special quicker than kdb+ is evolving. See arrow / parquet / numpy / kafka, they each solve parts but kdb+ had them all 10 years ago in <2MB.
2. The ratio of learners to advanced programmers has increased every year for the last 20 years. The languages that have gained popularity in that time range are those with the easiest learning curve. Most beginners no longer want to sit with a book frustrated on 2 characters for half a day.
Most beginners never wanted that.
but what we know is that what they don’t want is to produce more endless ugly and buggy code into the world - we’ve produced enough of that before they learned how to locate their asse(t)s.
Http://klongpy.org
[put your favorite Java here] is also a fancy calculator by the virtue of Turing completeness. what’s your point?