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.

>>80
That jerk sounds like a total idiot. Hardware is pretty bug-free precisely because it's so braindead. Software layers above it are buggy precisely because they are necessarily complicated -- to allow programmers to comfortably inhabit those layers.

That idiot appears to honestly believe that he can have both, "dare to imagine a proper computer – one having an instruction set isomorphic to a modern high-level programming language" -- and that that computer would magically come without the same infestation of bugs that any modern compiler has. And of course it's "political forces" that "strangle at birth" people's attempts to deliver that. I wonder if the Jews microwave his own apartment, introducing bugs into his OS (if the poor goy can't even make a stable high-level abstraction in software, I can't imagine what an abomination his hardware would be).