A.Those designed by a single inventor or small team without supervision.
B.Designed by committee and adhering to a plan from above.
Which type you like more and which you use in practice?
This is a bit of a false dichotomy, as even the languages in A tend to become used in the form of B. I like Lisp, but I use Common Lisp, not Lisp 1.5. The only example of a pure A language I'm familiar with and also commonly use in that form would be APL, although Forth also counts.
The languages of A have their purposes, be that experimentation or innovation, but I don't think B languages should be criticized. Ada is a nice B language, designed over years collecting requirements, appropriately for the US military.
It's a bit of a non-answer, but I use these two different types of languages about evenly. I tend to be able to expect new thoughts and ideas from A, and more practicality from B, although I don't learn a language unless I expect it to teach me something that will change my ideas of programming.
As far as languages do divide into these categories I agree with >>3, innovation happens in A, consolidation in B. However, I'm not sure the split is really along the right lines; the ultimate kitchen sink languages, Python and C++, were both largely designed by 1 person, while the examples of Ada and CL as committee designs were given above.
Maybe the difference is more between languages designed from a set of basic principles (Lisps, Forth), or to solve specific kinds of problems (Prolog, Erlang), vs those made to be a general purpose tool with the broadest possible array of features.
>>1
Perl is A, for sure, but I wouldn't know where to put Scheme. Its committee is much like a small team without supervision and then you have plenty of single man's dialects.
Javascript is in both camps now, though maybe you meant originally designed.
Found this video and comments extremely interesting:
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=TdzsB-iYj4Y
Esperanto is in camp A and I like it a lot!
>>7
There're committee designed conlangs?