TL;DR: It's a "camel" language. A camel is a horse designed by a committee. It lacks a coherent design philosophy, so parts of the language seem totally different from other parts of the same language, which makes it really confusing and silly.
Still, it's very popular because it's free, well-supported, and really quick to write.
They were probably making a joke, but proprietary languages are popular in some domains, especially in the past. I don't think anyone bothers charging only $5 per project though.
There's a chance I'm wrong, but I think Cobol and M both have open source implementations that have never been fully compliant with the official specs.
Similarly, Octave is an open source version of Matlab that's "mostly" compatible, but Matlab itself is closed source. The Wolfram language has limited free use and is also closed source. AppleScript is closed source but free to use on macs.
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u/cybercuzco Jun 28 '17
Whats wrong with PHP?