Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development

This is nothing new. People were constantly introducing new languages back in the 1990s too. Of your preferred languages, Rust and Typescript are fairly new. They are among the success stories of this tower of Babel.

There's a constant churn of replacing and improving languages. Nobody is using Algol, Pascal or Smalltalk anymore, and even COBOL is losing ground. (Only Lisp and C seem to survive everything.) There's a constant process of learning and improving, that resulted in this latest generation.

And every language is good at something that no other language is good at. There are good reasons why some people prefer Perl, Python, Javascript or C for some tasks. Kotlin is rising in popularity because it's turning out to be the better Java that Groovy and Scala weren't.

Expecting everybody to use the same programming language for everything is like expecting a carpenter to choose a single tool to use for everything. And maybe a Swiss army knife really can do it all, but still not as well as a more dedicated tool.

They should invest into making it pleasant to use in Linux and Windows too if they want adoption...

ML devs (using mostly Linux) will not bother to build a useful rich ecosystem of general purpose libraries. And amongst the other devs, Windows matters a lot, macOS is a small and shrinking niche outside US.

The specialized languages are a pain, but a single language that tries to be everything to everyone tends to be more of a pain. That's because it can't specialize, it has to adopt the lowest common denominator approach. As a result it's unlikely to be the best in any given area (sometimes it happens, but rare in my experience).

Where this hurts the most is in hiring. To get a job with Google you'll either learn one of these really well and so only be able to apply to one area of Google, or you'll learn several of them but not go in depth as much in the same amount of time and be able to apply to many different areas of Google.

Your idea of a limited language ecosystem (a languages for each of system, web, and metal-to-abstraction) is a good idea, but I think it still invokes the LCD problem. Though nowhere near as much. It would not surprise me that much if we hit the extreme of specialization, with a specialized language for each slot of the {mobile, server, desktop UI, IoT} x {each of the seven layers of the OSI stack}. As I wrote that I was thinking you could create Karnaugh map like depictions of languages to show what areas they cover.

I think a very varied programming language ecosystem is a good thing, and we're never going to get a one size fits all language, but there's a balance needed. The jury is still out and I'll have to see if it turns out well.

I agree to a certain extent, ( And the list is missing Elixir / Erlang )

But if we look at it from a very high level, I see this sort of happening already because Kotlin and Swift are very similar. They have both taken all of their ancestors's good idea and repackaged it within their own constrain. ( JVM and Objective-C ).

And combatively speaking, Rust is new. It hasn't been tested by millions of developers and production usage. Where they may find edge case in its concept and design, before we reach a conscious to replace C or C++, if that is even needed.

CoffeScript died ( in terms of Development, not usage ), because JS evolved, someday TypeScript may died too, as it itself might become the future of JS.

So over time these PL and idea converge, and consolidate. And through Natural evolution we will reach that point you described, with few languages that all look similar. And I would not be surprised if 5 - 7 years down the road C# ( Microsoft ) , Kotlin ( Google ) , Swift ( Apple ) all looked similar.

As to why it shouldn't be just one languages, well I doubt M$, Google, Apple will ever play along well with each other.

> But Go, D, Julia etc. only repackaged existing knowledge...

Sure but you could also say that Google (the search engine) only repackages existing knowledge. Not much different from that famous HN comment [1] which says yould could use FTP & CVS instead of dropbox.

If we take Go as an example, sure code style guidelines were old news when Go came out, yet gofmt is still considered one of the best features of the language, because it removes bikeshedding and dictates the one true standard.

In other words, like in cooking, it's not so much about the ingredients but how you package them.

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224