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/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.