Please ELI5, I lost track. I used to learn a bit of C and a bit of Python a few years ago but never really went deeper into programming. And now suddenly it seems that a host of new programming languages have appeared and that stuff that used to work fine in whatever old language it was in is now rewritten in a new language.
How do languages like Golang and Rust differ from older languages (these two have probably been around a while but for me they feel ‘new’)? Why are we coming up with new languages all the time? Besides those two, what other languages are there worth knowing about? Is it worth learning them? Are they going to come up with yet another one next week? (I know, many questions, an invitation to infodump I guess …)
People fogured out that there are better ways to abstract problems than what we thought 50 years ago. Hardware also has changed, now favouring a lot more concurrent programming on multiple threads, rather than efficient sequential execution.
In some cases languages have evolved but keep back compatibility, like C++, where you can use modern features like template genericity, metaprogramming, introspection, coroutines but still do OOP with virtual functions like in the early 2000s or pointer juggling and manual allocation like C.
This comes at a great cost of complexity, so people figured that limiting the scope of languages to only modern stuff frees up cognitive space and kept on adding languages.
Since software development is still a young science all this is still being figured out, so there are a LOT of new languages every year.