If any of you happen to still be on Reddit, I actually maintain a "catalog" of these newer languages, as they come across my radar. One of my more recent finds is MiniScript, which the author of that has been using to port a fair amount of classic BASIC games from that GitHub archive I posted about recently. I got sucked into Nim, which seems like a good synthesis of Python, Javascript, and C++; c/nim exists for anyone interested.

There are a lot of people with a lot of opinions and preferences that are trying to do a lot of different things in a lot different ways. The same reason we have so many of anything.

Without new programming languages we would still be using FORTRAN, AGOL and LISP.

https://fortran-lang.org/learn/quickstart/hello_world/

https://lisp-lang.org/learn/first-steps

https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-membership-news/timeline-of-programming-languages

One reason why new languages are developed is the creation of a "Domain-specific language" or DSL. See Wikipedia for more information.

Programming languages are tools you pick the one for the job, there are situations where Java's garbage collection could be a problem so it would not the right tool to use.

A given programming language often has limitations which are largely different than the limitations from others. This means that different languages are often used on different kinds of problems. Want something fast, use C. Want to write something quickly, use python. Want it to run on just about anything, use Java. And so on.

So why don't we make one ultimate one or a few that fulfill all needs? Well, partially because we haven't figured out how to do that, but also it's really easy to learn yet another language once your understand how they work. I can write in python, js, c, c++, c#, Java, kotlin, rust, perl, ruby, php, forth, lisp, and I could keep on going for quite a while. The underlying concepts are largely the same and so picking up a new language is no big deal (though being good at it is a bigger deal). We have so many because ultimately it just doesn't really matter that we have so many.

People need and want various levels of abstraction, type system control, and even just syntaxes. In these cases, it's easier to switch languages - or make one - than to implement a solution in a language that would fight against your needs.

Like human languages, you get different types of expressiveness in different ways. If you know multiple languages whether is python or Java, or English and French / Spanish / German, you'll see that there are positives and negatives to each language.

Lots of people want to design the best combination of them all, using the newest tools and newest tech to create something as useful as possible.

We should make one programming language to rule them all!

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards_2x.png

01001010 01110101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000

Especially if one of them is based off the other.

Rust is based off of C/C++
Ruby is based off of Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, BASIC, Java, and Lisp

Just a couple of examples. Quite frankly, it's dependent on what system, what infrastructure .etc that'll be the call for a specific programming language. Nothing wrong with just picking one or two and sticking to them.

And I think that's what a lot of beginners in wanting to study programming languages can fall into, they want to be the jack of all trades in programming. But there's this problem of a new language coming in all of the time and it can get very wiry trying to remember them all.

We don't/ None of them are a significant improvement on PL/1 other that having objects (which hadn't been invented.) I blogged on this recently. https://bobbrowning.wordpress.com/2023/07/02/typescript-i-quite-like-it-plus-bonus-rant-about-languages/