I'm curious how one ends up with such ahistorical sequence. I'd expect it to be more aligned with the actual PL history. Mainstream PLs have had a fairly logical progression with each generation solving well understood problems from the previous one. And building on top of the previous generation's abstractions.
Turbo Pascal for education, C as professional lingua franca in mid-90s (manual memory management). C++ was all the rage in late 90s (OOP,STL) . Java got hot around 2003 (GC, canonical concurrency library and memory model). Scala grew in popularity around 2010-2012 (FP for the masses, much less verbosity, mainstream ADTs and pattern matching). Kotlin was cobbled together to have the Scala syntactic sugar without the Haskell-on-the-JVM complexity later.
And then they came up with golang which completely broke with any intellectual tradition and went back to before the Java heyday.
Rust feels like a Scala with pointers so the "C++ => Rust" transition looks analogous to the "Java => Scala" one.
>I'm curious how one ends up with such ahistorical sequence.
they are all actively in-use.. if gp is earlier in their career, it could all be in last 10 years.