[johngossman]

There is a 1963 RAND paper where they considered whether it was time to standardize on a programming language (Not yet, was their conclusion). It contains one of my favorite quotes: “About the same time, however, a further complicating factor arose--the designing of programming languages became fashionable. Now the proliferation of languages increased rapidly as almost every user who developed a minor variant on one of the early languages rushed into publication, with the resultant sharp increase in acronyms. In addition, some languages were designed practically in vacuo. They did not grow out of the needs of a particular user, but were designed as someone's "best guess" as to what the user needed (in some cases they appeared to be designed for the sake of designing).”

Personally, I find nothing wrong with designing for the sake of designing.

[johngossman]

One thing I miss about the Internet of just a few years ago is that such papers were freely available. Alas, now behind a paywall.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3447.html

[gloria_mundi]

It is, of course, still freely available if you plug the title into your favourite search engine.

From the US Defense Technical Information Center: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0296046.pdf

Also in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0296046

The mentioned quote is on page 22.

[johngossman]

Your search-fu is better than mine.