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.

If these were expected services of the hardware, a lot of duplication of effort would be removed (at least from software).
Bollocks. If it was easy to make a one-size-fits-all framework for GC, bounds checking etc, then various virtual machines could just use it.

Now consider the fact that designing, improving, finding and fixing bugs in the same thing implemented in hardware is a hundred times harder.

If you want to build your house on a concrete foundation, why don't you just use JVM? How would the same thing implemented in hardware magically be any better?

And it's not that anyone would be crazy enough to actually implement any significant part of it in silicon (because then improving and debugging becomes not merely much harder, but actually impossible), so what you want is basically a hardware with JVM in the firmware forced on everyone (except it would be a magical JVM without any flaws, lol). Such an alluring prospect!