Another factor, I think, is that a heck of a lot of people don't think they will still be doing this for a long time.
Programming is something interesting and fun they are going to do for a few years while young, until (pick one) {their band takes off, someone funds their startup idea and they hire others to do the programming while they generate genius ideas and run the business, they get promoted to a high paying executive position that involved management and architecture and others do the coding, their podcast becomes a hit and they can live off that, the small company they work at IPOs or gets bought and they make enough to retire at 30, etc).
So they learn a fairly easy language that has lots of libraries that cover most things you do in a routine developer job.
...and before they know it they are 50-60 and still writing a lot of code, and realizing that if they had known they would still be doing this 30-40 years later they would have been better off if they had learned and used and gotten good with some of the languages that have a reputation of being very productive but hard to learn.
I'd also add spreadsheets and database to that. At one point I was the database guy at work, because no one else was available. I learned enough SQL to get by, but was in no way a database expert. Heck, we had to pick job titles at one point that described what we did to have on the business cards the company was giving us, and I put down "Database Roustabout" [1], which should give you an idea of where I stood. That was 20 years and I'm still the database guy at work. It would have been a lot better if sometime early on I had said "I'm going to become really good at SQL even though I'm sure someone else will become database guy in a year or so".
[1] Roustabout. NOUN. An unskilled or casual laborer. (North American) A circus laborer.
Programming is something interesting and fun they are going to do for a few years while young, until (pick one) {their band takes off, someone funds their startup idea and they hire others to do the programming while they generate genius ideas and run the business, they get promoted to a high paying executive position that involved management and architecture and others do the coding, their podcast becomes a hit and they can live off that, the small company they work at IPOs or gets bought and they make enough to retire at 30, etc).
So they learn a fairly easy language that has lots of libraries that cover most things you do in a routine developer job.
...and before they know it they are 50-60 and still writing a lot of code, and realizing that if they had known they would still be doing this 30-40 years later they would have been better off if they had learned and used and gotten good with some of the languages that have a reputation of being very productive but hard to learn.
I'd also add spreadsheets and database to that. At one point I was the database guy at work, because no one else was available. I learned enough SQL to get by, but was in no way a database expert. Heck, we had to pick job titles at one point that described what we did to have on the business cards the company was giving us, and I put down "Database Roustabout" [1], which should give you an idea of where I stood. That was 20 years and I'm still the database guy at work. It would have been a lot better if sometime early on I had said "I'm going to become really good at SQL even though I'm sure someone else will become database guy in a year or so".
[1] Roustabout. NOUN. An unskilled or casual laborer. (North American) A circus laborer.