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French is awesome. It probably has the weirdest way to say eighty and ninety I've ever seen:

[70]
English: Seventy.
Spanish: Setenta.
French: Soixante-dix (sixty [and] ten)

[80]
English: Eighty.
Spanish: Ochenta.
French: Cuatre-vingt ("four [times] twenty")

[99]
English: Ninety-nine.
Spanish: Noventainueve. ("ninety [and] nine")
French: Cuatre-vingt dix-neuf ("four [times] twenty [and] nineteen")

I only took a few classes, but this really looked weird to me

In Belgian French you have 'septante' for seventy and 'nonante' for ninety. These are used in Swiss French as well and they might even use 'huitante' for eighty, and i use it too since it makes more sense. Once upon a time there was an 'octante' for eighty too.

We have that in English too, though not often used, as in:
80 = Four score
90 = Four score and ten

I can never get used to the Danish way of counting. It's almost as bad as the French.

[50]
Swedish: femtio (five [times] ten)
Danish: halvtreds (half third [times twenty], where half third = 2.5)

[60]
Swedish: sextio (six [times] ten)
Danish: tres (three [times twenty])

[99]
Swedish: nittionio (nine [times] ten [and] nine)
Danish: ni og halvfems (nine and half fifth [times twenty])

I've also learnt French a bit, and thus I will let myself point out, that 99 is even slightly more awesome than what you wrote: because 19 = "dix-neuf" means literally "ten [plus] nine", so finally it goes as:

99 = "four twenty ten nine"

when I think about that from time to time I still get a feeling that someone who created this world must have been joking

Well, for one thing, it enriches the expressiveness of the language. It's also a very natural, human thing. My native language Urdu, also has male and female genders for all nouns and verbs are modified according to the gender of their subjects and objects. In fact, in Urdu, and many other languages, its not possible to say something without a gender involved.

To remove gender from say, French, would be as wrong as saying "Me hot" instead of "I am hot" in English.

Why is it there? Because that's how the French language developed: it was there in Latin, and it was there in Proto-Indo-European, and beyond that, we don't know.
What purpose does it serve? It conveys information, just like any other part of speech.
Does its absence result in something lacking in content? Yes, indeed.

It was also there in old English as well... but we got rid of the crap only keeping it for some things such as referring to ships as "she" instead of "it" which is just anthropomorphizing rather than really keeping the old rules around.

Not saying English doesn't have its own issues, after all, it is also an evolved language, not a perfect language.

When people ask me about the history of the English language i usually say something like:

"Well, first we were invaded by the Romans while we were speaking early Gaelic/Germanic type languages around the regions, then we got invaded by the vikings, then the church influenced the language, France invaded us and we had a French Royal family but we got our own back and invaded France and gave them a British Royal Family for a while..... basically English has been modified over the years by everyone who invaded us or who we invaded to the point that Old English is barely recognizable to a current inhabitant of the British Isles."

And this I think, is a good thing. Because of all this English is a very flexible language and many students find words from their native languages in English due to cross-pollination.

Cant remember the words now, but over the last couple of years was even amazed to discover some words of Russian origin in English. Also, if you learn a but of Russian then some of the words in Stanley Kubrick's - A Clockwork Orange, are instantly recognizable.

The fact that so many languages make it so hard to write anything in a gender-neutral way is often a big problem. My 11-year-old daughter is very sensitive to sexist language and assumptions lately; if her native language were not English, things would be much worse.

Douglas Hofstadter of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame wrote an interesting essay about what life would be like if we used a different human attribute than gender to make language distinctions:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

I agree. Hallowed are the computers!

The reason we all use n+1 stupid conventions is that French and Americans exist. If they didn't, everyone else would just standardize on one option and forget about obsolete local alternatives.

The Universal Coordinated Time is called UTC which doesn't stand for anything because the French were all like "uh non non sacre bleu".

And then the Americans are all like "it was all like 100 degrees outside".

Maybe on Venus.

yyyy-mm-dd is a standard now, I am taking bets on what century they will accept it.

>I kept asking questions to my teacher (French himself) as to the purpose of it - why? what does it serve? the absence of that results in something lack in the content being transmitted?

As a French myself, I can tell you, it has absolutely no purpose, which isn't surprising language evolved more or less randomly so it's not very surprising that the result isn't 'rational'.

Note that even minor proposal to simplify French such as replacing ê by é which sounds the same failed, so radical improvement such as adding a neutral gender are quite hopeless..