One programming language I never used was IBM's PL/1, which stands for Programming Language One. IBM billed this langauge as the only computer language you would ever need to learn. Obviously that never materialised but today's question is why PL/1 or another language has never become dominant?
For the record BASIC was my first programming language and all in all it wasn't a bad introduction. It had all the fundamentals that we still work with today (variables, constants, subroutines, expressions, loops, arrays, inputs, outputs, etc.). Then at Uni I learned Pascal followed by COBOL in the workplace. Since then there have been a plethora of 4GL's and GUI based IDE's and scripting languages have come and gone. The list almost seems endless with the only constant being native SQL.
I want to get back to my computing roots and learn a 3GL like language to start developing software as a hobby, but the choice of languages is bewildering. For example off the top of my head there's C, C++, VB .Net, Java, C#, Javascript, Perl, Python, PHP, iPhone SDK, Android SDK, etc. The list goes on. I suspect that just as the server and database business has rationalised over the last few years we are due for some pruning of computer languages. So long as they are archived for posterity - I'm hoping so anyway.
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