I work in a multi-cultural office and there are many different languages spoken throughout the day. That sparked the question "why are there so many languages in the world?" Because if there had been only one then I would be able to understand everyone without hindrance..<p>Someone took their time and wrote this article about it, which was a short and good read. TL;DR we speak so many different languages just so we can identify what group a certain individual belongs to http://www.academia.edu/8652559/Why_are_there_so_many_different_languages_in_the_world<p>It did make me ponder whether the same is happening to all programming languages but the internet suggests the reason why is because they all do some things better than others. It then made me wonder whether all of the programming languages will become extinct one day and we will have one superior programming language to use throughout all software domain. From web sites to mobile apps, car ECUs to washing machine chips - any programmable electronic device basically.<p>Does anyone think this is possible? If so, what would the implications be?
You should clarify what you mean by "extinct".<p>No one speaks Old English, which became Middle then modern English. But the language changed over time, so there was no one point where it went "extinct."<p>So, is FORTRAN 66 "extinct"? What about Python-0.9? If so, then K&R C is dying.<p>It is not the case that there are so many programming languages because "they all do some things better than others". The BASIC interpreter I did in BASIC was a lousy language. But it was fun to write.<p>Languages also exist for reasons that have little to do with quality. Javascript got its start, and oddities, because of internal political reasons at Netscape. What it does "better" is it's in web browsers, but that's a post-hoc justification, as every popular language is in use in part because people use.<p>It is hard to know what the future will bring. Perhaps when the Great AI awakens in 2355 there will be no computer languages as the Great AI will do all the work for us.<p>But until then, no, I see little likelihood of a grand unification. Excel, for example, is a very specialized programming language with its own IDE that is unlike, say, Java and Java development environments. It's so different that most people don't even recognize Excel as a programming language.