Comment by dboreham
3 months ago
Folks, this is not a process that converges. We've now had 60 years of language design, use and experience. We're not going to get to an ideal language because there are (often initially hidden) tradeoffs to be made. Everyone has a different idea of which side of each tradeoff should be taken. Perhaps in the future we can get AI to generate and subsequently re-generate code, thereby avoiding the need to worry too much about language design (AI doesn't care that it constantly copies/pastes or has to refactor all the time).
Practically it has kinda converged, though not necessarily on a global optimum. Most coding is done in relatively few languages.
It's bimodal. Most of the world uses one paradigm of programming (declarative programming via Excel and SQL), while developers use another paradigm (imperative programming via Python/C/C++/Javascript et al.).