As a lifelong fan of marginal programming languages, I've spent my fair share of time wondering why they don't get more use. I would really have liked to use more Clojure over the last fifteen years. But the reality is that there are good structural reasons we make the choices we do. One thought experiment I've used to explore why involves the notion of a hypothetical 'zero cost' programming language. What happens to a software project if all the costs of expressing the code go to zero?