There are a lot of programming languages out there. Despite this we keep creating more. Why is this?
It's understandable why there would be many programming languages in the early days of computing. Hardware was limited and different machines, even from the same company, were often not compatible with each other. As computers got faster and more capable, one would have thought we would narrow down on a few programming languages to get everything done. And yet programming languages proliferated.
My hypothesis is that there is a tension between ease-of-use and expressivity. The dynamic range betweeen these two features is very large, and every language designer has their own idea as to what the perfect compromise is. This leads to a cornucopia of programming languages, each with their own specific compromises between ease-of-use and expressivity.
After years of working with many programming languages I've found that expressivity is supreme. "Easy" and "safe" programming languages have one of two fates. They either admit that their limitations on expression were too much and add more features to the language, or the language dies. The problem with adding more features is that they often don't mesh with the original design. After all, the language was designed to limit the very thing that's being added. The language ends up bloated and complicated, and everyone ends up using their own specific subset of the language.
The reason expressivity is supreme is because eventually professionals have to get work done and ship code. A language that treats its users like a baby will end up requiring far more complex and volumous code to get the same job done as a language that is designed for highly trained proffessionals.
Look at musicianship for example. If someone wants to learn violin, do they start with a dumbed-down violin? No. Everyone uses the same violin with the same capacity for complexity, nuance, and expressivity from the beggining. The journey of learning the violin is the journey of developing the skill and discipline to control the immense expressivity and nuance of the instrument. A person who spent years learning on a dumbed-down violin would actually be a worse violinist than someone who started learning on a real violin from the beginning.
Unfortunately, nearly every popular programming language is either the "easy", and therefore artificially limited kind, or the bloated kind. There is no "dangerous" and expressive language for professionals. A language that offers control at the assembly level all the way to creating system level abstractions just doesn't exist.
Maybe someday though.