Avery's flu-induced theory of the day:

C is like cvs. Old, hacky, but fairly easy to understand, available everywhere, and you can fix it when it breaks. Also, a little too much dependency on arbitrary text substitutions in your source code.

Go is like svn. Nice clean design, intended for users of the old system to migrate fairly easily, but there are a few fundamental design decisions that just grate on you day after day. But businesses use it because it's solid engineering and you can pay people to put up with minor annoyances as long as the work gets done in the end.

Rust is like git. Totally bonkers, bare metal, user-hostile, and only a small few can understand it, but somehow it beat svn in the open source world because it let people solve problems that svn simply couldn't do. (Clearly Rust hasn't beat anybody yet, but this is my flu-induced theory so I can theorize whatever I want.)