Off course this doesn't apply to all languages. But I was wondering if some languages only exists due to the market culture of concurrence.
For example, we all know that C is widely used for built in and light weight systems. And, as far as I know, no one bit them.
But how about JAVA, C#, Ruby, PHP, ASP.NET, Python, Perl and son on?
I know that PHP is much more light weight then ASP.NET and JAVA and some would say it is its differential, because you can deploy applications much faster. Others would say that, despite that, in the future, you'll realize that you'll need a more robust language.
There are different cases, like in the twitter case, using SCALA.
What would you say if, for example, tomorrow you wakeup in Garden of Eden, where everyone works together without competitors. Which programming languages would you merge or discontinue?
My point is: Is there programming languages that exists only due to competition or all of them have very specific applications and cannot be thrown away or have their functionality merged?