evaluation question

[rbowman]

On 1 Feb 2023 17:31:02 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

> rbowman <bowman at montana.com> writes:
>><Venting> Why does every language have to invent their own function to
>>print to the console that is very similar but not the same as the rest
>>of the herd?</Venting>
> 
>   Why do there have to be different languages at all?

https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/abc/programmers/introduction.html

"Why ABC?
The answer to the question 'Why a new language?' is the same as the answer 
to the question 'Why new computers?': because they can help you do the job 
better. With the choice between a language where it will take a week to 
write a program, and a language where it will take an afternoon, most 
people will choose the latter."

That leads to the question of when Van Rossum was looking for a hobby 
project, why not extend ABC?  Or Pike?

https://pike.lysator.liu.se/about/history/

Then there is the question of how a new language becomes popular. When 
Matsumoto developed Ruby it was almost 4 years before there was any 
coherent English documentation. How did it get traction?

How about Go? Thompson and Pike hate C++ (with cause) so they went back to 
C and reworked it. Then there is C++ itself, which was released before its 
time. 

There are many more obscure languages when someone saw a need. Then there 
are features the propagate like lambdas. Everyone came down with lambda 
envy and shoehorned them into the language one way or the other.