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.

>>66                                `
>x86
>high level
Nigga, please. x86 was designed when chips had tens of thousands of transistors. There's nothing ``high level'' about it. Block copy and 8-bit BCD aren't high level. Even a Z80 had those. 68k, PDP-11, and VAX were much nicer for assembly programmers to use. x86 was the worst instruction set ever made. Any praise it gets is from people who don't know anything else.
Intel's iAPX 432 was a high level machine but they made instructions bit-aligned. Totally ruined performance. GC microcode and checking the bounds and authorization of every memory access barely mattered compared to having to shift every bit of every instruction in a slow as fuck non-barrel shifter.