your first programming language isn't really analogous to your native language. there isn't actually a fair comparison between programming languages and natural languages. active users of a programming languages seems a fair enough measure of liveness.
Sure, but I think the question is what we mean by "active." I think "has anyone written code in this language recently" isn't a great metric, because by that measure pretty much any language that ever has had adoption is "alive" by virtue of being used in Advent of Code, as the OP points out. This just seems contrary to my intuition about what it means for a PL to be alive and have a healthy community. What I meant by "first language" was more about community growth, and there being people willing to mentor newbies, new projects being started for new users to hack on, etc.
