It's always going to be hard for something new to get a look in. There is, of course, the economic reason that, for example, C/C++ guys are two a penny but Eiffel and Smalltalk guys aren't.
This is one of the most misleading abuses of statistics around. Just because the probability that you hit a C++ programmer if you throw a rock into a crowd is very high, does not mean that the probability that he can replace _your_ C++ programmer is any higher than finding a replacement Eiffel or Smalltalk programmer. Because you have to weed through tons of idiots who only _claim_ they know C++, the effort required to find a real replacement may be significantly lower for Eiffel or Smalltalk. Besides, if you can find a good programmer, chances are very good that he will be able to learn any programming language you use reasonably well in the time it would take to find a good C++ programmer. And learning from the sources of the previous programmer is a lot easier than learning the language from scratch in a general, application-independent way.
I have actually witnessed this. A company I worked for got a new manager level that was completely superfluous, so the new manager had to prove to herself that she had a real job, and spent a lot of time arguing against using languages that were not mainstream, and basically made it hard to use anything but Java, and many good people quit. Then a Java man got seriously ill. She was unable to replace him in the 5 months he was away. The other Java men could not do his work. To her amazement, choice of language mattered less than the other skills the programmers had. The conclusion from this story that this manager actually arrived at was that it was bad to have skilled programmers -- she alone should make the design decisions and programmers would simply implement them. She could now return to her policy of using only mainstream languages and hire only unskilled programmers who lied about knowing a language. As far as I know, nothing interesting has happened at that company for a long time.
This is actually just common sense. Unfortunately, it's all too uncommon in this industry.
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