I am not the o.p. but: the success of Unix helped the success of C, JavaScript succeeded because Netscape made it the only one on the browser, C++ won the war against Objective-C as the "object-oriented successor of C" because Microsoft embraced it and they had a lot more power than Next (that embraced Obj-C). Python did sustain its fight with Ruby (and PHP) for the role of "sane successor of Perl" because Google provided so many libraries and frameworks.

Google's contribution to the success of Python was really minimal. Most of the top stuff was not from Google at all.

Microsoft was the last C vendor on MS-DOS to add C++ support to their compilers....

I wonder why people keep pushing this, Microsoft was the last C vendor to support C++ on MS-DOS.

Even on Windows, all the C++ alternatives were way better until they released the 32 bit version of Visual C++.

Yep. The way I remember it is that until MSVC 6, everyone was still using Borland or Watcom tools. Even up until the early 2000s, Borland C++ Builder was giving MSVC a run for the money. There was also a plethora of quality but smaller-marketshare tools like the Digital Mars stuff.

The real reasons C++ "beat" Obj-C have more to do with a) AT&T aggressively marketing C++ for at least 6 years before NeXT showed up on the scene, b) C++ being a little older then Obj-C in the first place, and c) Obj-C offering all the expressiveness of C with all the efficiency of Smalltalk (thank you, James Iry).

Also other things that came to mind, CORBA on UNIX, Apple's move from Object Pascal to C++, and the whole Taligent project that ended up nowhere.