Why are there things like c++ and python when computers have to be programmed. Why does there need to be so many languages when one could solve it?
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About 40 years ago the US Department of Defense completed a project to define Ada, the one computer programming language to rule them all. It had everything that could ever possibly be needed, Algol-like program structure with compile time generated type checking, complex type definitions with bit perfect representations in memory so that hardware interface code could be written. Even multi-threading was built in to that language using a memory safe mechanism for exchanging data between threads that the design team called ‘rendezvous’.
The only thing it didn’t have hadn’t been invented yet, a new idea called Object Oriented Programming that encapsulated data and code into a common unit all tied together by a single reference that was being experimented with by Alan Kay’s team at Xerox. Those ideas eventually changed all modern computer programming languages, but poor Ada, designed by committee and slow to respond to new ideas never managed to incorporate OO. A little bit of syntactic sugar was added in 1995 to allow a similar syntax to be used to that of C++ when it invokes and object method, but the other features of OO, or more recently Aspect Oriented programming were never added.
And that is really the main problem with universal programming languages. New ideas sprout up all the time, and experimenting with those ideas requires a new language to express them in. Purely declarative languages like HTML and SQL have very different structure from imperative languages like C++ or Python, and that is good because it lets us reframe our way of thinking about a problem.
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