So we ended last episode with programming at the hardware level with things like plugboards and huge panels of switches, but what was really needed was a more versatile way to program computers - ...

Computers need programming languages to function. That’s just a simple fact of life. However, these languages didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. They were developed by people for explicit purposes.

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the ...

Newer languages might soak up all the glory, but these die-hard languages have their place. Here are eight languages ...

Did you know that, between 1976 and 1978, Microsoft developed its own version of the BASIC programming language? It was initially called Altair BASIC before becoming Microsoft BASIC, and it was ...

Ever heard of Hello World? This sample code is a programmer’s rite of passage, but what does it mean and why do we use it? Discover the program’s history and see how it reveals various language ...

Several technical advances have been achieved recently in the pursuit of powerful quantum computers. Now, Computer scientists have made an important breakthrough in the field of programming languages: ...

A while back, TheServerSide tackled the value of teaching Java as an introductory programming language. The author did a nice job of analyzing the language in terms of its features, its complexity and ...

A few days ago I wrote a post about what programming language you should learn first for a career in programming. This sparked a lot of conversation (much of it on Google+ submitted without reading ...

Programming quantum computers is becoming easier: computer scientists at ETH Zurich have designed the first programming language that can be used to program quantum computers as simply, reliably and ...