Too many languages

There are thousands of programming languages.

The purpose of a programming language is to express programs. The
purpose of learning programming languages is to build up a toolbox for
reasoning about and synthesizing programs in any one given language.

There are diminishing returns on learning programming languages, and
time is scarce.

Therefore one must select between programming languages to study.

A good selection of languages has both
+ breadth
  + satisfies a number of real world economic needs.
+ focus
  + exploits similarity between languages and incremental learning.
  + some unifying basis

A good member of a particular selection meets a number of the
following criteria:
+ Satisfies one particular school of thought on programming languages.
+ Significant difference from predecessors
+ Significant influence on successors
+ Economically significant
+ Advanced i.e. no direct, established and proven heir.
+ A good language.
  + Easy to express programs with
  + Easy to read programs expressed with
  + Easy to reason about programms expressed with

No one of these criteria are sufficient or even necessary conditions.

A bad member satisfies the opposite criteria.

>>97
Hardware with GC, bounds checking and type checking, which dollar for dollar ran programs as fast as hardware today, would be superior to that hardware.

It would not, because five minutes after it was designed, and six months before it shipped, someone would improve the software, and everyone would just keep using that instead. It is not just that it is hard and expensive to make. It would be a thing lesser than the sum of it parts. Namely, the parts would include a GC that no one asked for or cared to use.

I assume you have never written a compiler, a garbage collector, nor a CPU.