I've heard arguments that different langs were adopted by companies that became huge and had financial incentive to scale the language and build tools. FB with PHP for example. Twitter abandoned Ruby so it hasn't yet benefited from big co putting tons of full timers on it.https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/960614183598518272 …
Also, Oracle might be in the process of doing this for Ruby with Truffle. My impression though is that alternative Ruby implementations have a hard time keeping up though so I'm not sure how to reason about whether it will pay off for the entire ecosystem.