proliferation of computer languages

[cartercc]

On Jul 18, 1:17 pm, "xah... at gmail.com" <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Today, i took sometime to list some major or talked-about langs that
> arose in recent years.

You missed PowerShell and ActionScript.

Languages are just tools. It may have escaped your notice, but it's a
remarkable fact that no two languages are alike! It's not the language
that we should focus on, but the task at hand. Personally, I feel that
we can gain a lot more by studying the different kinds of problems we
can solve by computing and relate the language to the job, rather than
learning a language and then trying to find a fit with a particular
class of problems.

If you look at TIOBE and the like, you will note that the top four
language categories (Java/JavaScript, C/C++, Basic, and Perl/Python/
Ruby) account for around eighty percent of the language usage (not
counting PHP), and all the other languages quickly fall off. No. 13 on
the TIOBE rating was PL/SQL at 0.073 percent. If you read the
employment ads (Dice, etc.) the percentage is even greater for the big
languages. To me, this indicates that we have several mainstream
languages that account for the vast majority of work and a vast number
of task specific languages for special purposes.

CC