programming languages are often less "designed" than you might think. consider the history of C: the path leading up to the first formal spec, ANSI C 89, was tw

programming languages are often less "designed" than you might think. consider the history of C: the path leading up to the first formal spec, ANSI C 89, was twenty years long and involved endless mutations and competing versions--commonly called "dialects"! many languages (perl, python, etc.) have only a reference implementation, not a spec per se, and things like HTML (not precisely a programming language, but definitely a computer language) are so flexible and underspecified in practice as to resemble human language quite closely.