I think it's closer to an availability thing. A lot of businesses used to run on privately built programming languages. And everyone had their own BASIC impleme

I think it's closer to an availability thing. A lot of businesses used to run on privately built programming languages. And everyone had their own BASIC implementation that wasn't quite compatible with everyone else. But transferring the private language across to someone on the other side of the world was difficult. It did happen over early things like IRC and the like, but the audience was limited, and the data was ephemeral. For example, Byte Magazine has an article on writing your own assembler in 1977 [0]: "By doing it yourself you can learn a lot about programming and software design as well as the specs of your own microcomputer, save yourself the cost of program development, and produce a customized language suited to your own needs or fancies." Programmers have been creating their own languages since the beginning. It's part of why we lean so heavily towards standards - so other people don't break the things we've already built. [0] https://archive.org/details/best_of_byte_volume_1_1977_06 https://archive.org/details/best_of_byte_volume_1_1977_06