No it's more like 9000 implementations of the same programming language. Only those from academia have ever been new languages.

It seems that Kotlin was adequate, which is why they chose it. With no idea of the project or the team working on it, I'll assume good faith that they were right.

They didn't choose Kotlin; they created it. (Though, having looked into alt JVM langs recently, I agree that they probably made the right choice in creating something new).

Or yak shaving?

I remember reading comp.compilers for a long time and people would always post about creating the next great language. They first thing people (usually John Levine) would ask it, "Why does the world need yet another programming language?" Not necessarily to discourage, but to invoke thoughtfulness.

There's nothing wrong with new languages. But it seems people are popping them out left and right these days. I think Javascript frameworks are the only thing that come faster.

So, do we _really_ need yet another new programming language?

Down vote me all you want, but at least I ask the question.

Well, 99% of those are silly little "my first programming language" thingys, and these are easy (if you care about those things) to recognize and ignore. They invariably focus on syntax: removing the semicolon, or braces, or some other trivial thing along these lines. BTW even those can be useful for PL researchers as the language may have an interesting new idea or a new way of doing things. Highly unlikely, but does happen.

On the negative side, and this is really bad, some of these may be picked up simply because they are new, and then they just create negative value for people that pick them up (e.g. Coffescript) and fragmentation. Then they get abandoned because there is another newer thing. Sad.

Then there a languages made by people with background in creating viable (as in not-just-academic) languages. Typescript and Go comes to mind. These are good and "we" need them. These may add new features to the table, eg generics or union types or goroutines.

There is no easy answer to your question, my best answer is "depends on who made it".

Given the constraints we imposed on our decision, I'd say that number was quite lower.