It seems that some programming languages are simply better (i.e. overall safer, faster to read/write/compile/run, more expressive and efficient to develop in) than others. Overall worse languages often stick around though due to what often seems to essentially be community momentum--what could also be thought of as coordination failure.

Many individuals think "X lang clearly seems better, but Y is where the community momentum already is, so I am going with Y", and there isn't a clear way for developers and employers to commit to developing in language X instead of Y if "N quantity Y lang developers publicly commit to changing their next project that would otherwise be in Y lang to be in X lang."

While a public promise with public git repos may be enough, we may be able to even utilize smart contracts in the near future to help foster community-wide switches.

Also, while I'm not familiar enough with the languages to confidently say the dev community would be better if we could make the switch, I had: Python → Julia C → D C++ → D or Rust in mind, but whether or not you'd agree about these, I'm confident there are at least other switches worth making.

Would you pledge to switch to programming languages if enough of the industry agreed to do the same? If so, for which languages might you? Is this worth thinking about more?