Yeah, I admit my comment was not all that well thought out.

I was reacting to the usual dumbass theory that $BIG_ORGANIZATION is executing some master plan which explains all of their actions. It explains how they filter and rank ideas, but it doesn't explain why those particular ideas happened to be floating around in their organization.

When it comes to things like new frameworks and languages, in my experience, it's usually some employee going off on their own. And the reason why the language is the way it is has more to do with that person's obsessions and interests. They later justify it to the organization by producing results and getting peer buy-in. FLOW-MATIC (ancestor of COBOL), Perl, Java, Sawzall, Go, and Rust seem to be like this.

The other pattern is when companies intentionally make a language to compete, or lock-in a developer platform. Now this move really is predictable, and any MBA can draw you a 2x2 matrix showing why Microsoft had to create C#. Likewise VB, PowerShell, F#, and JavaScript. It doesn't mean they are bad languages. But they are often platform specific since their whole purpose is to corral developers into one camp.

I don't think Haskell counts at all. That was an academic project amalgamating other academic projects.

I don't know enough about the others you mention. Maybe this isn't a useful way to think about programming languages, but I was just exploring the idea by rambling about it. ;)

Objective-C was developed mostly by one guy (Brad Cox) back in the '80s. He was inspired by Smalltalk. He didn't do it on behalf of any corporation that I know of, though he and a partner did try to commercialize it later.