The challenge to that prior is that there is substantial overlap in the features and capabilities that were in, say Commmon Lisp a long time ago and yet there was a substantial delay in those features being accumulated in other languages with vastly greater adoption to this point (like Java, although that example might be disingenuous since the releases of Java and CLOS were only a year apart...)

Likewise during the last seventy years some languages saw wild uptakes in popularity for some languages much later in their life-cycle. Who would have expected the modern successes of Ruby?