Imagine you are the largest programming languages and software provider worldwide seeking to weaken your potential competitors, especially the Open Source part of the software market.

What would you do to achieve this?

The ancient history about the Tower of Babel has shown that splitting one language into many is very powerful in protecting the heaven from towers going too high up to the sky.

So why not apply this idea in modern times and put some money into supporting new ideas about programming languages contributing this way to increase of their amount? You can then put some more money to support their growth, so that they become visible ... and ... enjoy that the competitors are now split into small groups with only small market shares.

But what you do if some of the projects are getting so much traction that they start to dominate the others and become a real threat to you?

If you are the biggest player you may then hire the best developers which worked on that project and make it this way more and more your own. Or you hire the developers and indoctrinate them to a degree that they put the language in a direction in which it starts to loose its dominance.

Have you ever considered that this could be the most reasonable explanation how it comes that there are so many programming languages, libraries, frameworks out there? Coming and going?

Is it possible to find out where the money making some projects witnessing high growth comes from?

Further reading: Most used programming languages among developers worldwide as of 2023