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"Pleasing to corporate sponsors" isn't what comes to mind when I think about great programming languages.

But it probably is a prerequisite for any project achieving its mission on a large scale. I'd rather have a programming language that makes a big positive impact in the security, reliability, and efficiency of software that lots of people use, than one that's aesthetically pleasing but not widely used.

It's not an either or.

We have hundreds of languages made to please the corporate overlords.

Can't we just have one language that's actually nice to use?

C and C++ were never sponsored by large companies, and they did just fine. Zig is the same, today. (It has some small sponsors, but nothing like the corporate support of rust.)

>C and C++ were never sponsored by large companies,

I don't know what you had in mind for "sponsored" but others would disagree and say both C and C++ were "sponsored by AT&T Bell Labs" because the people who created them (Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup) were employees of AT&T. Analogous to Rob Pike, et al. of Go Language being employed/sponsored at Google.

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