There are a number of good, general purpose languages. What we seem to have less of is good, general purpose developers and good, general purpose <i>and stable</i> libraries. I have always been frustrated having to debug my tools as well as my project, and I would think others feel the same. Let’s try to stop inventing new wheels and refine those we already have.
The answer vastly depends on what general purpose you're after.<p>- General purpose windows? c#<p>- General purpose web? Javascript<p>- General purpose IOT? c++<p>The problem is general purpose doesn't work anymore? Not for at least 15 years.
Define “general-purpose”. All languages have limitations on what it can be used for out of the box (unless it can be cross-compiled into a different language as needed).<p>Define “good”. Good for what? Do you mean productive? Productive for whom? Do you mean “I like it”? In what environment?<p>Different developers like different languages. For example, some developers love explicit types. Others don’t.<p>In other words, there is a reason why we have many different languages and development environments. The same reason that explains why we will always and forever have new languages, frameworks, libraries etc. solving the <i>same</i> problem in a new different way.<p>That of course doesn’t stop developers from trying every day to come up with a “one-size-fits-all” language/framework/library/architecture that will solve all problems for all developers in all situations. It will never happen of course. But it sure is fun to see the language/framework/library/architecture wars from the side line. Bring popcorn! :)
javascript/nodejs. I had been using Matlab ~15 yrs until I left the institution that was paying for it. I looked around and js/node was the clear winner. NodeJS was being continually improved with faster engines, the browser as the default GUI for any app I could create, Node can access to C libraries directly. So though I didn't know it at the time, I became full stack dev. And that is on top of my real job of engineer/data scientist. Unlike a lot of my colleagues who know only python/Fortran/C/C++ I'm comfortable putting together a server to crunch the numbers, tap in to a dB, and serve it all to a GUI of my own design if need be. JS/Node is not easy but it is the most flexible language ... oh, and you'll never be out of work even if that's the only language you know.
Maybe the programmers would be better off using a dangerous language and blowing their legs off a couple of times. This cult-of-the-compiler mentality is starting to become tiresome. It’s not very good for productivity either.