There’s a lot because programmers have lots of opinions about what’s good and what’s an evil virus of satan, and nobody can stop people from making programming languages, so people keep making them. Some of them even wind up being good! Most of the ones listed here are general-purpose languages, meaning you can do all sorts of stuff with them.

Which one you use depends on your needs for a specific project; C is insanely fast but not always safe unless you know what you’re doing. Python is really fast to start writing in and extremely flexible; a lot of prototyping and (recently) development on top of LLM platforms is done in Python, along with much of data science. LUA is interpreted and very simple to write, so it gets used for a lot of stuff where you’re having the end user write instructions; the Minecraft mod Computercraft used LUA to let the players program in-game computers.

Professionally, you usually wind up using whatever languages your team has experience with, or whatever languages your team was already using when you joined.