One language to rule them all

Question

If we could start over with what we know now, would it be possible to have one universal language?

Answer 1

In my belief, no. There have been so many different architectures for code to run on, and an evolution of hardware, that we needed to start with punched cards, then assembler, then C, then C++, Java etc. The evolution has made sense.

The other factor, is diversity. Diversity of programming languages is needed for two reasons:
1) Different people tend to prefer different languages, which is often subjective (i.e. I don't really like python, but that's almost certainly a subjective value judgement, as other people love it, and it is obviously a very powerful language).
2) Different problems do better with different languages. For example, I tried to solve the "Fun With Digits" challenge (https://code.sololearn.com/wskK1Ku1R6U9/#php) in C at first. However, in PHP, it's much easier to evaluate strings that are mathematical expressions, in PHP, than C. When switching to PHP, I solved the problem ten times quicker (at least). C and C++ would do better in other areas though.

That's my take on this. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinions and ideas.