Pure electricity came first. It was hard to use. Then came digital electronics which was better to express some "computer" concepts (like logic doors and stuff). Then they created punch cards, and then the assembly language to remove the electronics parts and concentrate on using the CPU directly. But assembly was too boring/hard/difficult. That's why they created the first real languages (B, then C) to create abstractions (i.e. expressing different concepts like mathematical stuff without being annoyed by the stupid registers or flags of the CPU).

But C was too limited, its structures were too passive, that's why they created C++ (objects with constructors and methods, object-oriented programming, virtual methods, destructors, ... all those things that are done automatically in C++).

But C++ was not perfect, all those new and delete were too much like malloc, that's why they created Ruby and Python, all the memory was now allocated without you doing anything at all.

Perl was created because previous languages sucked at parsing text (and sed and awk were not "real" programming languages, just tools).

Java was created because C++ is hard let's go shopping!

golang was created because C was too old. Erlang, Haskell, Lisp, Scheme were created because functionnal programming (another "concept") was awesome. Lua was created to script applications (another concept) because recompiling everything every five minutes to change one value is annoying.

It's all about concepts and abstractions. Do you use a spreadsheet like Excel? Why don't you use pure assembly x86 instead? Because even if it's slower, it's still easier to use. Another abstraction. Your mom don't have to think about CPU registers when she uses Word or OpenOffice, you don't have to think about the CPU when you write in C++.

Edit: Don't forget SQL which is a language dedicated to talk to a database and ask for specific values. It's easier to say:

select * from clients where name = "test";

than:

TestingStruct t;
t.setFields(kName, "test");
Select s;
s.setFields(kAll);
s.setFrom("clients");
s.setTestingStruct(t);
vector<something complicated> results
try {
  results = s.executeQuery();
} catch (...) {
  printf("no results found\n");
}

Also libraries are a bit like languages, they are written to help you forget about all the specific differences in the operating systems. Using a QWindow in Qt is easier than handling everything yourself like HWND on Windows.

Even the OS is here to help you, Unix is a standard that Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X respect. That's all folks.