Could you elaborate on the drawbacks of having "too many languages"?
I thought that it was commonly accepted that having a diverse ecosystem of programming languages was good thing for everyone (Companies and engineers) because it fostered and fueled innovation in more mainstream languages by showing that feature X is relevant, or possible or desired by the community.
I sincerely don't see how it could be a problem? You can just ignore the bad ones or those that don't suit your needs while enjoying the others. Also, I might be mistaken but I am under the impression that new PLs have faster iteration cycles and are more receptive to feedback to suit one's particular needs.
I personally enjoy to see a new programming language makes the front page of HN because they often try to address existing problems in current big PLs, in a new way or incorporate state of the art PL theory concepts that I did not know!
Edit: why the downvotes? This is a genuine question!
I don't know why people are downvoting either, but I feel like you deserve an answer. I'll admit others are probably in a better position to answer you though.
A language's popularity is not really proportional to how clever it is unfortunately. For example, Javascript is extremely popular but that's because it's the only language supported by all browsers. Ruby is popular because.. well probably because Rails is in Ruby, although I haven't used Rails enough to know whether it needed to be written in Ruby. From my limited time using Ruby though, I don't see how it solves a different problem than Python does, but hopefully someone more familiar with it than I am can pass on his or her wisdom.
Having a diverse language ecosystem is not necessarily good because there are a finite number of people working on them, and having more languages means each of them will not be worked on as much. On the other hand, making a new language CAN be good when an existing language doesn't fit a particular problem well.
Having to learn a new language, while fun, is still time consuming and I think most people would agree that there is time better spent except in the case that a language truly presents something novel. Of course, most would also agree that the more novel something is, the more time it would take to learn as well.
In any case, because of the effort required to both make and learn a new language, I think the person you are referring to was implying that people are currently too liberal in deciding to make a new language and instead we should only be making a new one if it's actually warranted.
Let's say I want to join a new company / contribute to some open source project. In winner-takes-all-world, I already know the language they are working in and am familiar with the framework they are using.
In super-diverse world, I have spend a few weeks getting up to speed. Cannot drive by commit easily.
Well, I started writing an answer (about me, having difficulties with picking the "right" technologies for my new website), but then I saw rifung's comment. Actually, I couldn't say it any better than he did.
I thought that it was commonly accepted that having a diverse ecosystem of programming languages was good thing for everyone (Companies and engineers) because it fostered and fueled innovation in more mainstream languages by showing that feature X is relevant, or possible or desired by the community.
I sincerely don't see how it could be a problem? You can just ignore the bad ones or those that don't suit your needs while enjoying the others. Also, I might be mistaken but I am under the impression that new PLs have faster iteration cycles and are more receptive to feedback to suit one's particular needs.
I personally enjoy to see a new programming language makes the front page of HN because they often try to address existing problems in current big PLs, in a new way or incorporate state of the art PL theory concepts that I did not know!
Edit: why the downvotes? This is a genuine question!