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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

How do programming languages get created, and what goes into design decisions? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better ...

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 ...

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 ...

Lisp (historically, LISP) is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish prefix notation. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the ...