Why Do so Many Programming Languages Exist?

Computers are binary machines. Their language contains only two characters - ‘0’ and ‘1’.

a language with lathey thunderstand contains two letters - ‘0’ and ‘1’. Therefore the multitude of programming languages exist to aid the human users, not the computers. Therefore it is no surprise that the proliferation of programming languages is due to the

In this context, it is important to note that the only ‘programming language’ a computer understands contains two ‘commands’ - 0 and 1. Although such binary language is easy for the computers, it turns out to be the hardest for the human programmers. So the need arose for human-like languages. However, any human-like code needs to be ultimately translated to 0s and 1s, and therefore a programming language providing closest abstraction of hardware can be converted most efficiently. The proliferation of languages over the last 50 years was related to balancing of those two aspects. In the next subsection, we will look into how C, C++, PERL, python and R came into existence.

Program –> compiler –> 0/1

If any language can be used to solve any computing problem, why do we have so many? The reason for proliferation of programming languages is not too different from the reason for existence of myriads of human languages. Each programming language was initially adopted by a small community to solve certain specific computing tasks. Subsequently, new features were added to some of those languages and new users started to use them. Over time, some languages evolved to find widespread use, whereas many others did not survive in the race to be among the fittest.