(sry for long post)
>why did you guys just made one, stuck to it and then expanded/improved it?
Because over 50 years ago people realised the most popular language had serious issues so they made another one which did something differently. Repeat forever.
The only people who use ancient languages like COBAL are those fixing old systems that rely on it. It's (by today's standards) horrible by design, salvageable.
>is there a good reason, or is it just a dick contest and trying to be as cryptic as possible?
Not at all. (Unless you want to look into esoteric programming languages like 'brainfuck', but that's measuring dicks for fun)
Different languages have different pros and cons, or else most would die out.
Consider this contrast of popular language types:
- scripting languages: Python, Perl, Bash, etc.
>excellent for writing simple, high-level things quickly (eg. getting a webpage and finding all the youtube links and images on it, then saving them)
>'interpreted language', no need to compile before running. We can both run the same file and it should work identically
>'weakly typed'. I just say "x = 5" and a variable 'x' become equal to 5, or 5.0, or maybe even the character "5". Convenient, but more error prone.
vs.
- compiled C-like languages
>takes longer and more effort to program properly, but if done well it's much, much faster for most operations. C is great for operating systems and graphics stuff that actually need to run quickly.
>'compiled language'. You have to compile before use, which is a big part of why it's faster, but is slightly less convenient.
>strongly typed. I want to make a variable? I have to say "int x = 5". If I divide it by 2, it becomes equal to 2, because I made it an integer instead of a 'float' or 'double'. If I add 65,520 to it, it becomes to big to store as an 'int' so it overflows and becomes equal to "-10" (because I didn't make it a 'long int').
So some languages are made so you don't have to worry much about memory management or annoying special cases, but you have less control and usually those languages are significantly slower due to it having to make sense of all the things you never explicitly said. Then each language has it's own little quirks and benefits and drawbacks. Some are focused on mathematical stuff, some are focused on machine learning (AI stuff), some are visual programming languages with nodes, all kinds of stuff. They're just tools. I guess we could still have a decent world if the only tool anyone ever used was a hammer, but it wouldn't be the best world to build in.
