What causes new computer programming languages to be created?
In: Technology
Some languages are created for the hell of it. You see all these programming languages, and you think, “Why not create my own, just for fun?”
Some languages are created with different goals. For instance, Rust is slow to write in, fast to run. Python is fast to write in, slow to run.
Some languages are interpreted (Perl), others compiled (Go), and some run inside their own virtual machine (Java).
Some are special purpose — there are several math-oriented languages for example. SQL is specifically for manipulating databases. Some remain general-use but focus on something specific, like concurrency (Go).
Some languages adopt different programming paradigms — imperative (like C), object oriented (like C++), functional (like Erlang), etc. And then there’s blends of those.
Another thing that happens is struggles with backwards compatibility. As languages get older, they may get cluttered with edge cases or weird syntax issues because once it works, they feel they can’t change it or remove it from future versions. C++ is an enormous and enormously complex language at this point — you don’t need to know it all to write C++, but you may encounter C++ code that is painful to understand of somebody uses a different subset of the language than you.
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