A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behaviour of a machine, particularly a computer  Programming languages, like human languages, are defined through the use of syntactic and semantic rules, to determine structure and meaning respectively.

Programming languages are used to facilitate communication about the task of organizing and manipulating information, and to express algorithms precisely. Some authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms; sometimes the term " computer language" is used for more limited artificial languages.

Thousands of different programming languages have been created, and new ones are created every year.