You can’t easily improve a language and stay compatible with the previous versions. C++ does it but they are crazy.

you would think there would be some kind of universal language

It does not exist, but anyone is free to try and invent it. It should be low-level like assembly and high-level like BASIC, functional, object-oriented, and have weird stuff like traits, concepts, and alien features from Haskell. It must also have both the pointers/references of C++, and the borrow checker of Rust. And don’t forget to make it as secure as Ada with pre and post conditions. But it must still be easy to use. Also you will have to write a compiler for every operating system ever (mainframe, server, desktop, iOS, Android, every phone, every tablet), and contain a universal GUI that pleases everyone. It’s literally impossible to do right now.

Last but not least, Java was supposed to be this universal language that you can run everywhere. It failed and it cannot be run everywhere. It also had to be improved a lot, and it’s missing a fuckton of features from every other language.

Some languages have a obligation to support older versions, provide upgrade guides. They have old baggage in the forms of old systems or processes that they can’t just abandon.

Sometimes it’s easier to just start over from a clean slate. Experimenting and seeing how it works. If it fails well you haven’t inconvenienced millions of users.

It’s all about experimenting, trying to see what works, what it’s good with and what it’s not good with. A language like Java can’t just change to experiment things. Some people are also fixed to the style and methodology that Java provides.

Aside from that, hobby languages are just hobbyist stuff.

There is a time when you are solving/coding for a specific domain and you quickly start metaprogramming (coding a code generator). That’s the moment when you write your own Domain Specific Language. They have a tendency to grow and evolve. In time some of them become full blown programming languages themselves.

My suggestion, learn a few from different paradigms. They are more than eye opening.

you would think there would be some kind of universal language

We should make one programming language to rule them all!

imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards_2x.png

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.

For various reasons.

Different languages take different approaches and models to do stuff. Thus making each one better or worse for different challenges.

For example, python is easy and quick to get up and running. Bug it’s slow and unsuited for low level programming (like OSes, drivers, and embedded stuff). On the other hand, C is very fast and very low level, allowing you to make both high performance programs and low level stuff, but it’s a nightmare to use and you will run into all sorts of problems that an easier language, like python would avoid. All of this is mostly due to python being interpreted (instead of compiled) and c having manual memory management.

But they might also take a different approach at computation, like for functional languages (opposed to imperative languages) which try to solve problems in a more “mathematical” and declarative way, instead of defining a sequence of instructions. Or, even more, logic programming languages, in which you define a series of logical statements and the language tries to find solution and draw conclusions from them.

And some languages are designed around some particular concept that they think is beneficial and worth exploring, maybe taken from various other languages and put together, like rust which is designed around the RAII design pattern and takes large inspiration from functional languages, while still being and imperative procedural language (like C, so not object oriented). Or java which was designed to be a portanle but performante object oriented language, with support for low powered embedded system, full of features but simpler than c++, etc… all stuff that now is nothing special, but remember that java us very old. Or kotlin which tries to be java (they are interoperable), but modern and better and more “pure” or “consistent”. Or c++ that started as an object oriented superset of c, but then started adding every single feature of every other imperative language, and never giving up on older stuff, to the point of becoming very hard to use correctly while making it very easy to screw yourself in the most intricate ways.

And of course there are domain specific languages (opposed to general purpose languages). Which aren’t even necessarily Turing complete. They are designed for one purpose only, and they do that better than general purpose languages. For example AWK for text processing, or SQL for databases, or matlab for scientific calculations, or TeX for typesetting, or GLSL for shaders, or coq for theorem proving. And here imagination truly is the limit.

So, the point is, every language is more suited then other for some kind of work. And when people stumble across some problem that is hard to tackle and come up with some approach to solve it, or when they grow fed up with the issues of some older languages, they often like to make a new language around that. And some times this leads to entirely new paradigms which are worth exploring.

P.s.: I like languages:)

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.

Why are there so many different stores? You have grocery stores and hardware stores and computer stores and bulk stores and electronics stores and fire work stores, there’s even fast food businesses and strip clubs.

You can buy most of this as Walmart, so why isn’t there just a universal store?

What might compel someone to make their own language? Typically, it’s because they’ve already used some languages, they have some criticisms of it, and they want to make something better. Now, for languages that are open source and accept community contributions, that is an option. However, keep in mind that each language already has its own core maintainer(s), with their own vision, as well as a whole host of other people who would have to be convinced that your idea (whatever improvements you want to make) are a good fit for that language. Some changes can be quite drastic — especially if you want to improve one language by bringing in insights you’ve gained from another. So sometimes (not often, but sometimes), people say “fuck it, I’m making my own language, with blackjack and hookers”.

The thing about software is, it’s really easy to play around with. You don’t need a workshop or parts or anything — you just need your computer. As a result, you have lots of people tinkering with stuff like making their own programming language, whether just for fun or more tangible reasons.

And we’ve been in this cycle of innovation for decades, and it’s how we’ve gone from punch cards to assembly to C, Python, and all the rest.

But surely we don’t need any more innovation? Like, why can’t we all just use one language for everything?

Well, it’s true that nowadays we have a whole bunch of general-purpose, multi-paradigm languages. The analogy people like to make is “different tools in your toolbox”. But, to clarify, it’s not that some of them are hammers and others are screwdrivers; they’re all the same kind of tool (“programming language”), so really it’s more like different screwdrivers, of varying sizes, with differently shaped bits at the end.

With screwdrivers it’s clear why you might need one with this shape or the other: Otherwise it won’t match the screw. With languages it’s a little more subtle. You see, when you design a language (or almost anything else, ever), you inevitably make a series of tradeoffs. Is the language compiled or interpreted? Does it have a garbage collector? Does it have a strict type system? How does it do async? Does it support higher-order functions? There’s a million questions, and you’re going to get a different combination of answers for each language you look at. And that’s before you evaluate other (potentially very important) things, like “is this language fast enough for my use case?”, or “I need a library for such-and-such, has someone made that in this language?”, or “does the language have a solid enough community that I can reliably search the answers to my questions?”.

Technically, any of the major languages — Java, Python, C, C++, C#, Javascript, Go, Rust, etc etc — can be used as a one-size-fits-all, universal programming language. There’s actually a joke “law” that goes “anything that can be written in Javascript, will eventually be written in Javascript”. But they each have their own unique combination of design decisions, so in practice different ones will be easier to use for this kind of project or that (one major factor is third-party libraries, like python’s numpy or pandas, that may not have equivalents in other languages). There are also situations where, for a given platform, you have to use that language. For example, for Microsoft’s .NET stuff, I don’t think you can substitute C# for something like C++ (someone correct me if I’m wrong please). Or, if you’re working on the Linux kernel, you’re pretty much just using C (I think they were considering adopting Rust, but idk if that’s still going on). And, of course, the dominant programming language for anything on the internet is Javascript (although WebAssembly has made huge strides in roughly the past decade, so you can actually use other languages as long as they can compile to WebAssembly).

Finally, to wrap up this already way-too-long comment: a lot of these languages are very similar to one another. They’re all procedural, heavily inspired by C, and for the most part they’re either compiled and statically typed, or they’re interpreted and dynamically typed. There are also a whole bunch of other languages, called functional languages, that are designed based on entirely different principles (the principles aren’t harder to learn than what you’re having to learn for Java, they’re just different). But if you are looking for a universal programming language, I think the closest you’re going to get is either C, C++, Python, or Javascript. In addition to Java, I would strongly recommend you learn C and Python (C has a bit more of a learning curve, but it teaches you a lot about memory management, which is a lesson you’ll carry with you to any other language).

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 both.

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.