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 …)
Keep in mind that software engineering as a field is like, incredibly new, compared to a lot of other fields. Computers have not been around for that long, historically speaking.
It’s honestly to be expected that some of the first established languages did not turn out to be the best language that could be. We’re still figuring out how programming languages should be.
In 50 years, there will probably be another series of programming languages. They might even be optimised for LLM usage rather than for human directly, who knows. This stuff is all so new.