On Ousterhout's Dichotomy

from blog matklad, | ↗ original
Why are there so many programming languages? One of the driving reasons for this is that some languages tend to produce fast code, but are a bit of a pain to use (C++), while others are a breeze to write, but run somewhat slow (Python). Depending on the ratio of CPUs to programmers, one or the other might be relatively more important.