> Makes me wonder what kind of secret club they have going on
It's no secret; they lived through the time where the computing power was outstripping people's ability to express ideas harnessing that power, and the world was ripe for more expressive languages that leaned harder on the CPU to convert them into action.
And, that's still true. ;) New languages are being invented, some haven't caught on yet.
Another environmental factor is the end of Moore's Law. As single-core performance plateaus, we'll probably see more "bare-metal" native languages like Rust and Zig for applications that don't have the latency budget for higher-level dynamic languages with runtimes. We also see languages with good concurrency support like Erlang and Go become popular as applications need to become more multi-threaded to use multiple cores effectively.
It's no secret; they lived through the time where the computing power was outstripping people's ability to express ideas harnessing that power, and the world was ripe for more expressive languages that leaned harder on the CPU to convert them into action.
And, that's still true. ;) New languages are being invented, some haven't caught on yet.