False Dichotomy.

> Why are there so many programming languages? One of the driving reasons for this is that some languages tend to produce fast code, but are a bit of a pain to use (C++), while others are a breeze to write, but run somewhat slow (Python).

The only thing I learned was that there's a name for this. There's definitely more than 2, e.g. Lisps, Rust vs C++, and F# vs C#, etc. People think/work differently and use languages that work well for them.