This is an excellent point and I think that while most languages will fade away in time, if they even contribute one new idea the project is worthwhile. If we had asked programmers in 1991 what the point of Python was, the responses would have probably been similar to the parent comment, and look at where it is now.
I played around with Vala (a C# style language that compiled to C on Linux) back in 2010 and while I never used it for anything serious, it was fun to try out new ideas and see how they could work. There is value in these projects, maybe some of it will carry over into other languages, in others they may be the dominant language in 10 years.
> If we had asked programmers in 1991 what the point of Python was, the responses would have probably been similar to the parent comment, and look at where it is now.
> This is Python, an extensible interpreted programming language that
combines remarkable power with very clear syntax.
> This is version 0.9 (the first beta release), patchlevel 1.
> Python can be used instead of shell, Awk or Perl scripts, to write
prototypes of real applications, or as an extension language of large
systems, you name it. There are built-in modules that interface to
the operating system and to various window systems: X11, the Mac
window system (you need STDWIN for these two), and Silicon Graphics'
GL library. It runs on most modern versions of UNIX, on the Mac, and
I wouldn't be surprised if it ran on MS-DOS unchanged. I developed it
mostly on an SGI IRIS workstation (using IRIX 3.1 and 3.2) and on the
Mac, but have tested it also on SunOS (4.1) and BSD 4.3 (tahoe).
> Building and installing Python is easy (but do read the Makefile).
A UNIX style manual page and extensive documentation (in LaTeX format)
are provided. (In the beta release, the documentation is still under
development.)
If the authors don't even make a value proposition themselves, I assume the language is a learning exercise and won't take it seriously. Also not really worth critiquing things I don't like about it. Indeed, I see on the introduction:
> It started as a toy language following the excellent book Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom.
Nothing wrong with that! Sometimes the value is mainly for the author, and that's great. Probably not going to contribute any new ideas though.
I played around with Vala (a C# style language that compiled to C on Linux) back in 2010 and while I never used it for anything serious, it was fun to try out new ideas and see how they could work. There is value in these projects, maybe some of it will carry over into other languages, in others they may be the dominant language in 10 years.