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.
So, tower of babel analogy fits here.
There are many for the same reason that engineers don't make a single tool that does everything. There are so many different contexts for programming languages. At the core they allow expression of a solution. This draws on the context the language provides. More context, more concise solutions, but less generality. Also might incur performance penalty, which is a drawback in other circumstances. It's also hard to get a good balance of things in a language, and as things evolve they get used in different ways than when they were designed. And people start using a language and don't want it to change too much after that, so that language is kept around and new ones serve other uses.
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