It seems to me that programming languages have far stronger network effects than any other example you or I are throwing out. If one project uses git and another mercurial and they want to work together, there are ways (hg-git, plain old patches). Try incorporating some java code in a ruby project, however. No possible way that is going to fly. Yet, we (at least the hacker news crowd) haven't declared any language as "winner". I really hope version control does not stagnate at git.