Especially the first should be broken up. This is a call for suggestions of how that should be done.
I like support for lots of different languages. A change that may be quite simple may be to let the user keep some kind of "defaults" for the main languages in used; something a bit like keeping a number that seems reasonable... like, max up to 15 languages or 12 or something like that; and the others could be displayed in a side pane, such as "show more languages" or something like that.
Allowing a user to customize these results won't necessarily fix the original goal asked by elextr - but it would allow users to arrange it to their personal preferences (and ideally store this in a text file too, so that the user can keep this configuration for easy re-use).
I don't think breaking it up into "syntax style" makes a lot of sense for an end user's point of view. I don't know how pascal syntax works, so this information gives me less compared to the current status quo (even though I also find the grouping somewhat arbitrary). For the most part, I only focus on a few languages, and ignore the rest mostly (although simple colour highlighting is always nice to have, even for languages I am unfamiliar with).
It wouldn't be perfect, and the "C-style" group would have a lot of languages, but at least it's better than the incorrect/non-existent distinction of "Programming" vs "Scripting".
I think that both distinctions aren't great, but I definitely prefer programming/scripting as opposed to an even more arbitrary "syntax style".
Another more obvious way would be to group them alphabetically
This would actually also be better - that way people would easily be able to expect perl appearing before python appearing before ruby ... is simple. :)
I think most people will understand alphabetic sorting since it is so simple.
To the question how other editors/IDEs do it - bluefish used to just group via "text php python html" but you could arbitrarily select that to get the colour highlighting applied onto the current file in the main buffer.
Actually, in the long run, what would be ideal would be to have users be able to customize which colour/syntax highlighter could be used too, but I understand that this is outside the scope of this issue - just thought to mention it.
I guess alphabetic sorting is about the simplest solution. A customized/customizable view would be great too; for example, I don't think I may ever need pascal or COBOL or such entries. Anyway just my 2 cc. :)