system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: why are new programming languages always being created?

It seems like there are new languages "out" every year or two - what do the new ones do that old ones couldn't?
gpt
Programming languages are changing in two dimensions over time: abstraction and specialization. 

Computers, when you get right down to it, can't actually do much: just basic logic and arithmetic. Back in the day, "programming" was writing down a series of these basic instructions that would do something useful, like calculate a logarithm. But what's truly useful about that program is that anybody can copy and use it. Instead of writing your own instructions to calculate a logarithm, you just use the instructions someone else already came up with. Now nobody writes the code to calculate a logarithm themselves (outside of programming exercises). Modern computer languages just let you type something like "log(x)," and they do the rest of the work. Over time, we built up a bigger catalog of useful stuff computers can do and also had new ideas about how to best organize and implement all of it, so those ideas are periodically incorporated into new languages (or major updates to old ones). Also, using someone's off-the-shelf code is sometimes inefficient relative to writing something from scratch that is optimized to your particular application, but as computers get more powerful, there are fewer and fewer use cases where this is a concern. All of this means that modern programming languages are thus much more abstract (and also generally easier to use) than old languages like C or BASIC.

The other dimension is specialization. Someone working with data and statistics is likely to use tools like SQL, R, and SAS. Someone working on a website is likely to use tools like HTML and PHP. These languages/software come with built-in tools that make them easier to use for certain tasks. You maybe *could* build a webpage with R or a database with HTML, but it would be incredibly difficult. Other languages, like Python and Ruby, are much more general, and with the right add-ons can approximate many specialized tools, but finding and learning those add-ons is often not worth it (relative to just using a specialized language) for someone whose job only involves one specialty.