Quantum computers are still extremely rudimentary, and largely remain intriguing playthings in a few advanced research labs. That hasn’t deterred people from developing new programming languages for them.

The most recent one comes from Microsoft, which has unveiled Q# (pronounced Q sharp) and some associated tools to help developers use it to create software. It joins a growing list of other high-level quantum programming languages such as QCL and Quipper.

But given that practically nobody has a quantum computer, what’s the point?

Krysta Svore, principal research manager in quantum computing at Microsoft, says the languages are needed because the ones written for today’s computers won’t work for quantum ones. Classical computers encode information in binary form as a sequence of ones and zeros, whereas quantum computers use quantum bits—or “qubits”—which can effectively encode one and zero at the same time.

This creates vast amounts of parallel processing power, and explains why there’s such great interest in efforts to build the machines. The hope is that quantum computers will help drive significant advances in fields ranging from materials science to artificial intelligence (see “A Startup Uses Computing to Boost Machine Learning”).