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Why do they keep making new languages (lemmy.stonansh.org)

submitted 1 year ago by lemmy@lemmy.stonansh.org to c/programming@programming.dev

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Why are there so many programming languages? And why are there still being so many made? I would think you would try to perfect what you have instead of making new ones all the time. I understand you need new languages sometimes like quantumcomputing or some newer tech like that. But for pc you would think there would be some kind of universal language. I'm learning java btw. I like programming languages. But was just wondering.

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[–] garyyo@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

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.