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.

>>103
Virtual memory mapping is ``free'' in modern CPUs
Ahh, you're comparing apples with oranges. Having a CPU support for certain stuff required for making a GC is awesome, and the best part is that we have increasing amounts of it! Modern CPUs can mark pages as "dirty" on writes so that a partial GC knows which pages in the older generation it has to examine, this is already used in .NET, for example.

Trying to embed an entire GC into firmware on the other hand is both idiotic and pointless.

>>110
You're so clueless I don't even know where to start. Go read some papers about the way actual world-class garbage collectors work, not the Wikipedia's bird's eye overview. You underestimate the amount of effort required to make a modern GC so hard it's not even funny. That's besides being plain old ignorant, "incremental (works while you do other stuff)", "Software GCs actually swap garbage out to disk", lol.