There are so many programming languages because every CS major yahoo who takes a compiler course decides they can make a better language than everyone else. They start with a language the barely know and add a few things that are really only relevant to their understanding of software development at that point and then put it out into the world. Some of their friends decide they can pick up on the language and add their own specific "features" and it grows big enough for the already graduated CS newbs to pick up on as the "next big thing" and add more useless crap to it. Once some programming rag or forum picks up on it, it becomes a new trendy language to waste time on. Someone builds a framework for it and makes some totally not original and clunky project with it and it takes off as the other trendy programmer retards spread it around. It enjoys a few months of good press until it fades into obscurity because the next big thing comes around. Repeat ad infinitum.

Some languages do things better than others. There are tradeoffs depending on what it is that you're trying to accomplish.

Why are there so many different types of cars. Wouldn't it be better if we all drove a lada.

Morbo hit the nail on the head with the comment. I started out with Z80 assembly language then went to Cobol and Fortran, all courses courtesy of VA training courses. I coded in compiled Pascal for several years too. Now I just run my Linux workstation and say to meself, "works pretty good" -- and only change a script when I absolutely have too. That's usually after every single "update" since updates always bork something up, usually the printers or the zoom camera.

Why are there so many types of screwdriver? Or hammer? Shovel?

Different tools for the job. Not to mention new tech needs new languages. You're not gonna code web APIs with Fortran, or code AS/400 screens in C#.NET.

There are only a few that matter

Php C# Javascript.

All you need to know. All the rest are unnecessary like python or garbage held in use because of nostalgia like c++ or rich failed attempts at a language like Java or f

.

But worse than languages are the fucking fuck off and die frameworks.

Fuck I hate frameworks and similar.

Coders just need generic libraries that they can adapt to any solution. Instead dipshit big tech have a hundred frameworks and companies use a couple of them and require that programmers be proficient in thousands of combinations of languages and frameworks.

But if they actually are then they must be expert in nothing as no one has the time.

E. G Don't learn sass and less. Just fuking learn css.

Within the lore of this world if you believe it,

There are a couple different types of programming languages, higher and lower level programming languages. The close you get to machine code, the more specific the instructions can be. However, that comes at a great time cost and significantly large projects get impossible to manage.

The higher level a language is, the more human readable it is, with a caveat: it hides a lot of side effects of the shorthand techniques. There is a lot of inherent inefficiency with certain techniques to make things more human readable. That's why many programming languages started off as research projects to improve efficiency for specific use cases.

There's also hardware description languages that necessitate a new language.

Assembly, C, Haskell, and Verilog are all very different.

Why are there so many spoken/written/literary languages? It's essentially the same answer. People come at the same problem (describing operations to a computer/describing things to a person) independently and make it up as they go along. They don't converge because people have their own ideas about what's right and comfort zone.

It could be in the future that people will settle on a computer language. Musical notation, for instance, is fairly standardized now, but that was not always the case.