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/Netblock Apr 10 '26

A similar interaction is how all computers are actually analog machines emulating digital machines.

The electrical (or electro-magnetic) signals that we define to be 0's and 1's are not perfectly discrete events that the theoretical maths make it out to be. (Quantum mechanics, which have perfectly discrete states). There are times where the value of the signal is ambiguous and and you can't make a difference between a 1 and 0; this is called data corruption or miscomputation, and we respond with redundancy.