This post finally flipped my BOZO-bit. Programming languages are tools, and they are developed either to serve a then-pressing need – Perl falls into this bucket. Or, simply because the designers were paid to do it – Anders Hejlsberg was hired-away from Borland by Microsoft, for $4 million, after he had designed Delphi. Furthermore, the actual process of "designing a new programming language compiler or interpreter" is so routine that even undergraduate students are sometimes tasked with doing so within a single semester.