Comment by hardwaregeek

Nice! I've wanted to give a similar talk. My thesis is that Rust won on usability above all else. If you look at the semantics of Rust, it's essentially an ML style language with typeclasses and linear types. In some alternate history that's a PhD thesis by someone at Inria that exactly 4 people use. But by making the language actually usable with good errors, familiar syntax (yes, syntax matters!), and documentation, Rust got users. I don't want to get into an in depth comparison but if you look at the documentation of even the most popular functional languages, it's not even close. And they've had a head start of decades!