You make it sound like it's some kind of popularity contest, where people not choosing the language means it 'loses'. I disagree pretty heavily there - your hammer doesn't lose if you use your saw. The language's user loses if he is such a fanboy of hammers he refuses to use the saw. If Java improves to become the best tool (not saying it has/will), then choosing not use use Java because you 'moved on', is a failure on your part, not the tool.
The thing with analogies is that you have to know when they break down.
Sure the language loses. An hammer is self-sufficient; a language needs libraries, community support, job/project candidates that can replace an absent developer, etc. Do you think having NumPy isn't a win for Python?
Of course, if the language is sufficiently better than the others, maybe you're willing to write your own e.g. Websockets library to use it. But there's still a large handicap there.
For example, Plan9 is in many ways a better OS than GNU/Linux. But I still use the latter, because I rather have the support and thousands of binary packages that a larger community brings.
