alt Hacker NewsNot GP, but … because the overwhelming majority of programming is done in support of businesses selling things?
I’m not just talking about people who program for a living. The majority of academic CS chooses its research directions because of what limits people are running into for business; even privacy-focused software has been commoditized by many business; a large amount of OSS development is by (and often paid for by the employers of) people working for money; heck, after Linus’s initial “just a hobby OS” period even Linux’s contribution base was primarily driven by business needs (even if those needs influenced it via “contributor had a problem at work and committed a solution for it upstream in spare time” as often as “paid contributor upstreamed a change on behalf of their employer”).
Yes and no. Most of the big new languages today are created to support the business of selling things because languages are expensive to make, they don't generate any profit themselves, so the only people who have enough money to fund their development are mega corporations, who act in self-interested ways.
But look at historical languages and why they were created:
Algol - to explore writing algorithms
Fortran - to help scientists write programs using typical math formulas
Matlab - to help write programs in linear algebra
Haskell - to explore lazy program evaluation
ML - to explore how to reason about proof automatically
C - to build an OS
Python - to interface with an OS
LISP - to formalize symbol processing
APL - to explore programs defined over arrays
LOGO - to help young kids to program computers
Prolog - to create a language around the idea of formal logic.
Smalltalk - to create an entire programming system, not just a language
(I've left out C++, Java, and JavaScript because I feel like those languages are mostly about serving business interests)
Pretty much the entire computing landscape over the past 50-70 years has been defined by people writing languages for reasons other than "this is for a business to use to make more money". So if we let business-driven interest dictate the future direction, we will have missed out on all the things that could have been. Would Haskell ever have been invented if businesses interests were the only concern for researchers?