As an undergraduate, Rob Pike first read Brian Kernighan's book on the C programming language while home sick from classes at the University of Toronto. "I lay in bed and I read it cover to cover," ...

If you're thinking of learning to code, the language you decide to pick up first has a lot to do with what you're trying to learn, what you want to do with the skill, and where you want to eventually ...

So, the story goes something like this. In 1947, in Virginia, US, an error was spotted on the Harvard Mark II, one of the first programmable computers in the world. A ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

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 ...

Many computer programmers know multiple languages. The range of programming languages is wide, with some languages used in specific contexts, but some more general. For example, Java can implement ...

Every computer programmer has a copious pile of opinions about how their programming language of choice could be improved. Who doesn’t want more syntactic sugar, better runtime performance, and faster ...

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 ...

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 ...