Take this scenario:


A programmer creates a language to solve some problem.
He then releases this language to help others solve problems like it.
Another programmer discovers it's actually much better for some different category of problems.
By virtue of this new application, the language then becomes popular for that application primarily.


Are there any instances of this actually occurring?

Put another way, does the intended purpose of a language have any bearing on how it's actually used, or whether it becomes popular? Is it even important that a language have an advertised purpose?

Lisp. McCarthy originally specified Lisp in a paper to show that few simple notations are enough to build a turing complete language. He was surprised to find that Lisp could be implemented in machine code (Steve Russel did the first Lisp interpreter implementation). Lisp is widely used for AI programming.