[patrickmay]

"So what I don't understand and hope somebody here could shed some light on it is what's with all the new languages?"

While one can make an argument that these new languages address a particular need better than any extant language, I suspect the real reason is that it's more fun to create tools, including languages, than to solve particular business problems. As evidence, I offer the plethora of frameworks, libraries, and utilities that comprise the ecosystem of Java in particular. In many enterprise systems the business logic is a small fraction of the total running application.

"When I read about Smalltalk or Lisp or Haskell people regard them as the pinnacle of programming language design . . . ."

Lisp wasn't designed, it was discovered. ;-)

Thanks for the interesting questions.