I know. But it's still admitting defeat, as they're not as many as to make its liveliness self-evident, and make giving a list of projects using the language moot.

Nobody will ask for such proof from a language whose liveliness is not in dispute, one for which the see constant mentions on social media, jobs posted, major new projects being written in them, companies using them left and right, books a-plenty being written all the time about them, meeting people who use them is trivial, and so on...

>You just can't win this argument, if you try to prove the opposite you automatically lose, that's rather unreasonable.

This "inabillity to win" using such proof though, makes sense though if one understands "language X is dead" as not some kind of absolute statement that nobody uses it, but rather as it was meant: "it's not as lively as it was, nor it is particularly popular".

"But this company uses it somewhere" doesn't really answer it. Companies use all kinds of niche stuff here and there, on legacy projects, stuff they bought, or stuff done by some small team and used because "it works, so let's keep it", but that stuff remains niche. We can find companies using Eiffel, APL, and whatever too. Does mean they're not dead-dead either, doesn't mean there's much life in them.

If it was one of the handful of "Google sanctioned official langauges" for example that stuff is written is, that would be a good argument (even if that was still just an individual company).