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.

>>95
I think things would look great.

If you're trying to say the costs of experimenting with software are lower than the costs of experimenting with hardware, then I agree with you.

Again, my point is, Economics aside, Hardware with GC, bounds checking and type checking, which dollar for dollar ran programs as fast as hardware today, would be superior to that hardware.

The next best thing of course would be a sane operating system. Shame the momentum of UNIX and VMS killed all the Smalltak, Lisp, Prolog, Oberon and even Java OSes.

I hope Microsoft makes that CLR OS.