How and why are languages formed / Are there any developing languages showing promise? [closed]

Answer 1

1. The genesis of a programming language is always a different story. I'm currently reading "Masterming of programming", which is a series of interview with authors of popular languages. They explain what problems they tackled and how the language was born -- a really cool book.

2. The TIOBE index can give somehow a trend amongst the programming languages, including the emerging ones. I bet that the future lies in language that will run on top of the JVM or CLR (Notably due to the effort invested in the VMs which are now really great). Concurrency seems to be one of the hot problem of today; so I guess we will see some interesting moves in this area (e.g. Clojure).