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.

John Backus, the man who led development of the first mainstream programming language, Fortran, has died at the age of 82. His lifelong mission after joining IBM in 1950 as a programmer was to work on ...

Computer programs can use data, evaluate if-then conditions on the data and use extremely fast iterative loops to perform these functions. In software programs, these functions get organized into ...

From Reddit threads to roundtable events, debating the merits of programming languages is not a new phenomenon. And while much of the recent discourse has centered around AI’s impact and whether or ...

When the FORTRAN programming language debuted in 1957, it transformed how scientists and engineers programmed computers. Complex calculations could suddenly be expressed in concise, math-like notation ...