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.

>>28
Imagine today's most ubiquitous consumer computers were not Von Neumann machines but stack or dataflow machines or something like this.

Now imagine that there are no living operating systems written in C, that all C compilers are buggy and poorly maintained, there are no C compilers at all for consumer hardware, and that the C community is very small and that it is almost impossible to find documentation or help with anything.

No one will employ you for knowing C, and certainly no day to day applications you use or anyone else uses are written in C.

In this reality, C might still be worth studying, if it had other redeeming features, but it doesn't.

So it's very interesting that you'd say something like ``Oh economics don't matter'' and then say ``C is worthwhile''. I wonder what made you say this?