I'm half kidding. If it were better than other languages it could be sold or marketed successfully... I'd imagine at least. Far from my area of expertise.
What would you study to be able to do something like that?
Ehhhh, that doesn't really apply as much to programming languages.
Piggybacking off what
@Eric Blair said, why use your new language when I already know what I'm doing in Python/Java/C#/JavaScript/C++/etc.? What advantages are there in writing programs in your new language that would make up for the fact that I'm going to write damn near everything from scratch in it vs. using libraries in a more established language?
Even if the language is "better" than existing languages, quality alone isn't enough for it to stay alive and not end up like the many dead programming languages that have come and gone in the last 60 years.
There's also the factor of what platform the language can be used to create programs for. Swift was guaranteed to be successful just off the strength of being a new "blessed" language for iOS development. It's easy for Apple or Google to create a new language that's popular from day one because they have enormously popular platforms developers want to create apps for. The same can't be said for a language created by a random breh.
As an aside I'm not really sure why they decided to compare Swift and Go in the article besides the fact that they're created by Apple and Google respectively and those are probably the most visible and well known tech companies out there right now. I know Apple intends for Swift to be a system programming language as well, but last I checked, it's still generally slower than Objective-C, so I'm not sure it's quite ready for that role just yet.
