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 …)
EDIT: A deep reaching, long and detailed history of some programming languages, for the future passerby:
https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/programming-languages-are-authoring-tools-for-platforms
The best way to understand this is… to learn a new language. C and Python are language with some of the worst tooling out there. C was simply created before languages had decent tooling and the foundation responsible for standardizing Python is doing a terrible job. Just having quality tools to work with a language makes a big difference.
On top of that people keep coming up with better ideas to do things. Sometimes it’s possible to add those ideas into older languages and sometimes it’s not. Java was able to add algebraic types but it will never get rid of null values. Even when you can add new features they are always something optional. Creating a new language lets you take the best ideas out there and use them as a base for the entire language. Having strong base makes the whole language better.