A 15-PART SERIES · AUSSIE SCIENCE CLIPS
Programming Languages
The languages, frameworks and tools behind every app and website: what each one is, why it exists, and why people argue about it.
EPISODE 1 · 11 min
What's the difference between a language, a framework, a library and an IDE?
Ask a few programmers what they work in, and you'll hear answers like JavaScript, React, Node, or VS Code. They sound like four of the same thing. They aren't. One is a language, one calls itself a library, one is a…
EPISODE 2 · 12 min
How does code you can read become something a chip can run?
Here's a complete piece of a program, three lines long. It takes two numbers, a and b, and hands back their sum. You can read it. But the processor in your laptop can't read a single word of it, because a processor…
EPISODE 3 · 11 min
Is HTML a programming language?
Tell a room of programmers that you code in HTML, and sooner or later someone will tell you that HTML isn't real programming. It's the web's core language, the one web pages are written in.
EPISODE 4 · 11 min
How did a language written in ten days end up running the web?
Almost every website runs some JavaScript. The survey firm W3Techs found it on 98.9 per cent of the websites it tracks, as of the seventh of October 2026. Yet the first version was put together in about ten days, in…
EPISODE 5 · 11 min
How did JavaScript escape the browser?
JavaScript was built to live inside web pages. Yet today the same language answers requests on servers, runs desktop apps, and powers the tools programmers use to build websites. So how did a language made for the…
EPISODE 6 · 11 min
Why would anyone add rules to JavaScript on purpose?
Last time, we saw Deno run a language called TypeScript, straight out of the box. TypeScript is JavaScript with extra rules. Rules usually slow you down, and JavaScript is famously relaxed about what you can write. Yet…
EPISODE 7 · 11 min
Why do so many websites use a framework?
Open almost any app in a browser and things change while you watch: a message count ticks down, a cart fills up, a feed grows. Behind many of those apps sits a framework, with names like React, Angular or Vue. So why…
EPISODE 8 · 11 min
Why does a much-mocked language still run so much of the web?
Last time we ended on a number: 40.1 percent of all websites run on WordPress, and WordPress is written in PHP. Programmers have joked about PHP for years. One famous essay called it an embarrassment. So why does a…
EPISODE 9 · 11 min
Why is a 'slow' language the one everyone uses for AI?
Python has a reputation. It's easy to read, easy to learn, and slow. Yet, by GitHub's 2025 count, it's the main language for new AI projects, and AI is some of the most demanding computing there is. So how can a slow…
EPISODE 10 · 11 min
Why is so much still built on a 50-year-old language?
Last episode ended underneath Python, where the fast parts are written in C and C++. Python's own interpreter is written in C as well. So is Linux, and what its makers call the most widely deployed database in the…
EPISODE 11 · 12 min
What does 'write once, run anywhere' actually mean?
Write once, run anywhere. That was the promise Sun Microsystems made for its new language, Java, in the nineteen-nineties. In episode two, we saw that compiled code is a list of numbers that only one family of chips…
EPISODE 12 · 12 min
Why are people still inventing new languages?
Last episode ended on a hint: garbage collection is one way to prevent some memory bugs, but it isn't the only one. Yet between 2006 and 2009, a programmer at Mozilla and a team at Google each started a brand new one…
EPISODE 13 · 11 min
Why do so many apps still talk to their databases in a 1970s language?
Your banking app, your phone's contacts, the shop that just took your order: behind a great many apps is a database, and very often the app talks to it in a language called SQL. SQL grew out of an idea published in…
EPISODE 14 · 11 min
What does an IDE actually do?
All season we've been writing code, and now we look at where people write it. Yet code is just text, and you could write every program in this series in the plainest text editor. In episode one we called the IDE, the…
EPISODE 15 · 12 min
Which programming language should you learn first?
This season we've met HTML, JavaScript and its runtime Node, TypeScript, PHP, Python, C and C plus plus, Java and C sharp, Rust, Go and SQL. So if you've never written a line of code and you want to start, which one…