I mean if youre going to think of it that way any Turing complete language fits the bill, but what I mean by universal is a language you would reach for to solve any problem you have and it would be better than any other language. It’s not a computer science problem it’s a software engineering problem.

There can be a universal language in theory, but it’s borderline impossible to achieve. Every domain has a different set of problems that it needs to solve, and language design involves tradeoffs that may make sense for one domain but not another. That’s why I think language wars are silly, without context it’s impossible to say which language is “better”, because you could have different answers depending on what you’re trying to do.

In the end you shouldn’t be too concerned with it. There are lots of languages, but all of them fall under two or three paradigms where if you learn one language from that paradigm, your skills are mostly transferable.