There is no need for a language to be "special" just to get standardized.

The main driver is a group of people willing to submit the necessary documents to ISO (or national bodies like ANSI or DIN or even IEEE, and then ISO may also adopt existing standards as theirs).

COBOL, FORTRAN and Pascal are all ISO Standards [1,2,3].

[1] https://www.iso.org/standard/74527.html

[2] https://www.iso.org/standard/82170.html

[3] https://www.iso.org/standard/13802.html

I think before I was born, there was just a ton of (closed-source) C compilers for different systems. So people were like "we should have a standard, so our safety critical application doesn't break when we decide to use a <new hardware vendor's> C compiler."

I also think since compiler infrastructure has improved so much, and everything is open source now ... so idk if it matters as much anymore.

> Why are they "special" compared to other languages?

The world basically runs on C.

1) C is no C++, C89 and C99 are good enough for legacy/embedded systems. Also, C is the Ur example for anything. The golden standard. Like English for business and STEM. Not the best language, maybe, but it runs everything technical.

2) C++ it's a monster which should died long ago.

3) Go should take the role of small tools such as some services and mail/IRC clients, especially for CLI/TUI. Or stuff like urlview. Rust the big ones (media encoding, PDF libraries, browsers...)

4) Unreal 6 will ditch c++. Good riddance.

There are a number of ISO-standardized languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Programming_languages...

It makes big companies and gov bodies happier since and code investment is guaranteed to run with competitors tool chains. You’re not locked in to one vendor, it is an international spec.

Isn’t Rust also suffering from committee deadlock for the past couple years?