Why are there so many programming languages?
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* programming languages are generally somewhat specialised for use in certain applications, for example C is great for writing operating systems and hardware drivers, Perl is great for writing short scripts to manage and edit files, Julia is great for doing science, and Javascript is great for making websites – it’s proved very difficult to design a single language that works well for all of these things
* there are many different styles of programming that people prefer over others for various reasons, for example there are “declarative” programming languages in which you code various general facts and rules and state what the desired outcome is, as opposed to the more usual “imperative” languages in which you give the computer direct commands
* programming languages are often tied to specific hardware to some extent – in extreme cases you get things like APL which basically requires a special keyboard layout, but also older programming languages tend to have poor support for newer hardware features such as multi-core processors, while newer programming languages often don’t support old hardware at all
* companies often want to use their own in-house programming language instead of relying on a third-party language that they have no control over, so you often end up with languages that are very similar except for who controls them, such as C# (Microsoft) and Java (Oracle, formerly Sun Microsystems)
* programming languages never really die, because there is always code from older languages that’s still in use, and it’s generally easier to keep maintaining it in a mostly forgotten language than to rewrite the whole thing in a newer language
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