Your own examples contradict your hypothesis. Ruby is a generic scripting language, it is not better or worse than python or perl at anything. Rails made ruby popular due to evangelism, not solving a problem others do not (notice how rails was literally just a crappier django?).
"Being portable assembler" is not solving one problem at all, it is one of the most general things you could cite. That literally is being a better language.
Java took millions of dollars of marketing to make it popular, people didn't just suddenly flock to it because it was C with garbage collection (which was already a solved problem: see C).
Perhaps lisp "never took off" (seems like it took off pretty well to me) because it isn't the greatest language ever? Lisp barely is a language, it is more of a toolkit to build a language with.
> Java took millions of dollars of marketing to make it popular, people didn't just suddenly flock to it because it was C with garbage collection (which was already a solved problem: see C).
Could you please explain what you mean? C is the only language I know in any depth. Beyond a basic description, "garbage collection" is a fairly alien concept to me.
"Being portable assembler" is not solving one problem at all, it is one of the most general things you could cite. That literally is being a better language.
Java took millions of dollars of marketing to make it popular, people didn't just suddenly flock to it because it was C with garbage collection (which was already a solved problem: see C).
Perhaps lisp "never took off" (seems like it took off pretty well to me) because it isn't the greatest language ever? Lisp barely is a language, it is more of a toolkit to build a language with.