I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

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.

Figured this might be the best place to ask. I'm curious if there's any good books that give some detail on how and/or why some programming languages evolved the way they did, especially during the ...

This video is part of Electronic Design's 70th Anniversary series. This is a bit like Mel Brooks History of the World, Part I for programmers. I've been writing a number of articles and recording ...

In one form or another, C has influenced the shape of almost every programming language developed since the 1980s. Some languages like C++, C#, and objective C are intended to be direct successors to ...

After meeting Alan Turing, Mr. Brooker went to work at the University of Manchester and wrote the programming language for the first commercial computer. By Cade Metz Tony Brooker, the mathematician ...

Python is an interpreted, object-oriented and high-level programming language created by Guido van Rossum. The language’s design philosophy emphasizes code readability and simplicity, making it a ...

I am wondering if we are reaching some sort of inflection point in the history of computer programming? An inflection point brought on primarily by the rise of so-called ‘virtual machines’. In ...

The Java programming language emerged roughly 25 years ago, when Smalltalk and C++ dominated. Back then it was easy to argue that the world didn't need another object-oriented programming language.

Women were encouraged to seek employment in computing by appealing to traditional domestic roles Alana Staiti In 1967, the magazine Cosmopolitan featured an article about the growing number of job ...

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History will explore the invention of the COBOL computer-programming language on its 50th anniversary in a display ...