I don't know about that. BASIC may have been a huge leap compared to previous languages that ninety minutes was all you needed to be convinced to switch. It took me a whole lot less to figure out Ruby was amazing (granted at the time, I had a hard time remembering which way I was supposed to make the arrows face when outputting data in C++).

KnockoutJS has a great interactive tutorial which at the time was probably a one-of-a-kind when it came to Javascript frameworks. If other frameworks worked as hard on their online tutorials they may have convinced a lot more users their frameworks were better.

If you can't convince someone to continue learning Go in ninety minutes of an online tutorial, perhaps it says more about the quality of the tutorial than the attention span of the reader.

I wrote a program in Scala recently which ran slower and slower as I passed it a larger and larger sets of input data. Once the program started to take over 20 minutes to complete I decided to look into improving performance. Making the code run use both my CPUs in parallel was trivial. Essentially add .par at the end of some List object and then change a few function signatures. My 20 minute program now completed in 2 minutes. Had someone showed me that earlier, I would have learned Scala and functional programming a long, long time ago.