Some commonly used languages have been quite well designed or at least would have been considered so at the time when they appeared. Even if they have their weaknesses, they should be good for some purposes.
Now beauty of programming languages is highly subjective. So I do not claim any universal truth to this. But I consider the popularity of certain languages as an accident, at least for the time when they became highly popular. This does not preclude that good stuff has been done with them or that they have matured to some extent or even that their potential replacements of the time of their appearance have lost relevance. I do not mention the classics COBOL and Fortran, because they were early pioneers of high level languages. And looking at these two languages, one of them does not deserve to be mentioned together with the other one.
Anyway, here we go:
Pascal
Pascal was in certain areas popular before C took off. To a great extent this was true because it was used as a teaching language and because Turbo Pascal ran well on a PC with 4.77 MHz and 256k Memory and Floppy Disks only in the early 1980s. This was the hardware that many people could afford with some pain (prices around 5000 DEM in Germany). And it transported some interesting concepts to a wider public. People who knew Algol 68 used to consider it a step backwards. Anyway, in the later 1980s C was available to a broader public, because affordable hardware that could run C-compilers reasonably fast and conveniently came into existence. C does have its flaws, but it is a well designed language and I personable consider the step from Pascal to C one of the most positive ever encountered.
Python
Python is a good language with a lot of power. But I see it in a similar space as Ruby, which to me appears as one of the most beautifully designed languages. So why use Python if Ruby could serve the same purpose. While Ruby took off with Rails for some time, Python kind of took over where people were looking for a replacement for Fortran and in Data science. It now has really superior libraries in many areas and has achieved a very strong position in Devops, where it has taken over to a large extent from Perl and Ruby. So Python has really gained traction and I do recommend learning it.
PHP
PHP came out as an easier to use Perl clone for web development. In the 1990s and early 2000s CGI was a common way to do web application development and Perl was strong in this area. I still consider Perl the better designed language, even though it does have its flaws and weaknesses. A more critical view would be that PHP was an inferior clone that copied only what they understood. In terms of building a great open source community it would have been more desirable, if the PHP guys had contributed to developing frameworks and libraries that would have made Perl better. But competition is a good thing also, even in open source. And PHP has clearly won the competition for the web space against Perl and now has good library and framework support. Some of the negative reputation of PHP comes from the fact, that unskilled developers write a lot of PHP code, because they came from the web design space and just added a bit of PHP to their HTML code. This is not to blame on the language. On the positive side I would mention that a lot of really great software has been written in PHP, some of which I use on a daily basis, like Wikipedia and its underlying software MediaWiki, WordPress and a lot of others.
VBA
VBA comes as a development and scripting language for MS-Office, which is a useful thing. Like PHP it attracts non-developers who write ugly code, because they use MS-Office and enrich it with a bit of VBA, which is not to blame on the language. I have not really tried it enough, so I let others speak:
We do have to admit, that sometimes non-developers „get the job done“ in a fraction of the time that professional developers need using VBA and Excel. The drawback is, that this solution is really limited, because it depends on some excel sheets on drive C: of a certain team member. Or of course shared ones, but who is using it when? How many copies are there around? Data and program are together in one file…
Anyway, a lot of useful stuff is done with VBA and as long as we do not miss the point when it is time to switch to something else, this might not even be a bad idea.
JavaScript
JavaScript was developed in 1995 and gave some functionality to the browser. The original idea was to enable applets, but applets have lost their relevance long ago and JavaScript itself can now do everything that applets could do and much more than that. JavaScript did transport interesting concepts to a wider public, like lambda expressions or anonymous functions, that had been around for ages in Lisp, but only been known to a small fraction of the software developers. But the legitimate question is, why a new language had to be invented for this, instead of adding an existing and mature language like Perl or Tcl to the browser. They were good candidates for this in 1995, I would not recommend to add them now, because we do have more adequate choices now. Anyway, JavaScript lacked and to my knowledge still lacks decent integer types. All numbers are double precision floating point, which does express integers of up to 53 bits accurately, but for counting pixels some kind of sufficiently long integer would have been a useful thing. There was some hope coming up that Dart might be established as a successor to JavaScript. But not even Google with Chrome was influential enough to get this established. It did survive as one of many languages that can be „compiled“ or „transpiled“ to JavaScript, as TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Clojure, Scala and many other languages can now be transpiled to JavaScript. I was told that even JavaScript itself is transpiled in order to support different languages of the language from one source code base. New hope is coming with WebAssembly, which will establish a common binary language (like JavaVM) on all browsers and allow compiling languages to this target instead of JavaScript. Again, as PHP and VBA, many non developers use JavaScript, again coming from the web design background. And again, we have today very good web applications that heavily rely on browser side logic, which is implemented in JavaScript or compiled to JavaScript. This allows for much better user experience and saves power on the server which no longer needs to do the rendering. Moving JavaScript to the server side with Node.js looks like a weird idea. We have better languages to work with on the server side than JavaScript. But again, competition between concepts, languages and technologies is also a good thing.
Conclusion
All these languages have somehow reached a relatively high popularity, even though they were not really the most advanced choices. But a lot of good stuff has been done with them and is still being done for example with JavaScript, Python and PHP today. That is what counts most.
