Almost every language fixes a certain problem in a way that the authors felt was better than any existing method. In college I took part in an experimental Ada

Almost every language fixes a certain problem in a way that the authors felt was better than any existing method. In college I took part in an experimental Ada course - two semesters - taught by arguably one of the first dozen or so experts in Ada. Ada was going to save the world - everything in the US Government was going to move to Ada, learn it or be a dinosaur. Ada had some very unique traits that made it very flexible. Dealing with financial figures/budgets? overload your math operators to handle currency. Dealing with extremely accurate numbers for missile tracking? overload your math operators to handle extremely precise numbers. The problem was, after receiving this Ada training, replacing Cobol (which was the main intent), never took place. Now, the US Government allows programming groups to choose the 'right' language for the job. Ada is still used in some government and civillian tasks, but, it certainly didn't live up to the original hope. I believe portions of the Boeing 777 use Ada. It was still cheaper and easier to maintain Cobol code than to rewrite - and still is. I know two recruiters that occasionally mention their passing need for Cobol programmers - and it's been 25 years since Ada was going to replace Cobol. PHP was originally developed to get away from Perl CGI and allow pages to be easily scripted and customized. Every language has a particular strength or weakness and their own following. Not that you can't accomplish almost any task with any of them, it is selecting a language that might handle that task more efficiently. Even for something like webapps, if you had 30 people in a room, I seriously doubt you would get any consensus on the best language for web scripting. Add on top of the language choice, frameworks, and you've got another religious war. I don't think I have any projects that use a single language in deployment, even discounting bash from the equation. There are things that I find easier to accomplish in different languages.