About 20 years ago your choice of language basically boiled down to what you were going to pick for your web server. Your choices were

- Java (popular among people who went to college and learned all about OOP or places that had a lot of "enterprise" software development)

- Ruby on Rails (which was the hot new thing)

- Python or Perl to be the P in your LAMP stack

- C++ for "performance"

All of these were kitchen sink choices because they wound up needing to do everything. If you went back in time and said you were building a language that didn't do something incredibly common and got in the way of your work, no one would pick it up.