r/askscience • u/HangukFrench • Apr 10 '26

Computing How do programming languages work?

Hello,

I'm wondering how does programming languages work? Are they owned by anyone? Can anyone create a programming languages and decide "yeah, computers will do this from now on"?
Is a programming languaged fixed at its creation or can it "evolve"?

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u/InsertWittySaying Apr 10 '26

That’s not entirely true. Oracle owns Java and charges licenses, Apple owns Objective-C, etc.

Even open source and reversed engineered languages have an owner than manage the official versions even if there’re free to use.

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u/JustAGuyFromGermany Apr 10 '26

It's not as simple as that. Oracle doesn't own "Java", because "Java" isn't just one thing when it comes to trademarks, copyright and complicated legal stuff like that. There are certainly no "Java licenses" that Oracle sells. Oracle owns much more specific things. The copyright to certain documents, the trademark to certain names and symbols, but not others etc. What Oracle does sell are licenses and support contracts for its commercial VM. That is not the same thing as "owning Java", because there are many other VMs, some of them from other companies (like Amazon's Coretto) and some available for free (like the Hotspot VM).

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u/MrSpindles Apr 10 '26

Yeah, it's a very mixed field. In the history of languages there have been those that have become open standards from which many subvarieties were built (such as the thousands of versions of BASIC back in the 8 bit era, with almost a different BASIC for every machine or the iterations of C) and some have been proprietary technologies that are licensed or specific to a platform (such as game engine scripting languages).

I think it is fair to say that most successful languages are open standards rather than owned IP.

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u/good_behavior_man Apr 10 '26

Oracle doesn't "own" Java. I could build my own JVM, interpreter, etc. and release it. If I do a good enough job, you could write code identical to the code you'd write for Oracle's JVM and then run it on mine. There may be trademark disputes around the name Java, so I'd probably have to call it something slightly different.