Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer. Too bad nobody has that title anymore. Born in 1815, Lovelace was a 19th-century English mathematician credited with first interpreting how to ...

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 ...

The other day, my friend Ned’s cousin asked Ned what he thought was the best first language for new programmers. The cousin didn’t have much computing experience, but at 15 years old the future was ...

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.

According to various sources, there are several hundred programming languages, although only a couple dozen are widely used at any given time. The Online Historical Encyclopedia of Programming ...

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 ...