The Computer Programming Portal
Sample of computer program on a screen
Computer programming or coding is the composition of sequences of instructions, called programs, that computers can follow to perform tasks. It involves designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of procedures, by writing code in one or more programming languages. Programmers typically use high-level programming languages that are more easily intelligible to humans than machine code, which is directly executed by the central processing unit. Proficient programming usually requires expertise in several different subjects, including knowledge of the application ___domain, details of programming languages and generic code libraries, specialized algorithms, and formal logic.
Auxiliary tasks accompanying and related to programming include analyzing requirements, testing, debugging (investigating and fixing problems), implementation of build systems, and management of derived artifacts, such as programs' machine code. While these are sometimes considered programming, often the term software development is used for this larger overall process – with the terms programming, implementation, and coding reserved for the writing and editing of code per se. Sometimes software development is known as software engineering, especially when it employs formal methods or follows an engineering design process. (Full article...)
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Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.
Lovelace was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and reformer Anne Isabella Milbanke. All her half-siblings, Lord Byron's other children, were born out of wedlock to other women. Lord Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever. He died in Greece whilst fighting in the Greek War of Independence, when she was eight. Lady Byron was anxious about her daughter's upbringing and promoted Lovelace's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing her father's perceived insanity. Despite this, Lovelace remained interested in her father, naming one son Byron and the other, for her father's middle name, Gordon. Upon her death, she was buried next to her father at her request. Although often ill in her childhood, Lovelace pursued her studies assiduously. She married William King in 1835. King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, Ada thereby becoming Countess of Lovelace.
Lovelace's educational and social exploits brought her into contact with scientists such as Andrew Crosse, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone and Michael Faraday, and the author Charles Dickens, contacts which she used to further her education. Lovelace described her approach as "poetical science" and herself as an "Analyst (& Metaphysician)". (Full article...) -
Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American businessman, computer programmer, and investor. He co-founded Microsoft Corporation with his childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which was followed by the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Allen was ranked as one of the richest people in American history by Forbes with an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion at the time of his death in October 2018.
Allen quit from day-to-day work at Microsoft in early 1983 after a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, remaining on its board as vice-chairman. He and his sister, Jody Allen, founded Vulcan Inc. in 1986, a privately held company that managed his business and philanthropic efforts. At the time of his death, he had a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio, including technology and media companies, scientific research, real estate holdings, private space flight ventures, and stakes in other sectors. He owned the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association, and was part-owner of the Seattle Sounders FC of Major League Soccer. Under Allen's helm, the Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII and made it to two other Super Bowls (XL and XLIX). In 2000 he resigned from his position on Microsoft's board and assumed the post of senior strategy advisor to the company's management team.
Allen founded the Allen Institutes for Brain Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Cell Science, as well as companies like Stratolaunch Systems and Apex Learning. He gave more than $2 billion to causes such as education, wildlife and environmental conservation, the arts, healthcare, and community services. In 2004, he funded the first crewed private spaceplane with SpaceShipOne. He received numerous awards and honors, and was listed among the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2007 and 2008. (Full article...) -
Computer class at Chkalovski Village School No. 2 in 1985–1986
The history of computing in the Soviet Union began in the late 1940s, when the country began to develop its Small Electronic Calculating Machine (MESM) at the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology in Feofaniya. Initial ideological opposition to cybernetics in the Soviet Union was overcome by a Khrushchev era policy that encouraged computer production.
By the early 1970s, the uncoordinated work of competing government ministries had left the Soviet computer industry in disarray. Due to lack of common standards for peripherals and lack of digital storage capacity the Soviet Union's technology significantly lagged behind the West's semiconductor industry. The Soviet government decided to abandon development of original computer designs and encouraged cloning of existing Western systems (e.g. the 1801 CPU series was scrapped in favor of the PDP-11 ISA by the early 1980s).
Soviet industry was unable to mass-produce computers to acceptable quality standards and locally manufactured copies of Western hardware were unreliable. As personal computers spread to industries and offices in the West, the Soviet Union's technological lag increased. (Full article...) -
JavaScript (JS) is a programming language and core technology of the web platform, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites on the World Wide Web use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have a dedicated JavaScript engine that executes the client code. These engines are also utilized in some servers and a variety of apps. The most popular runtime system for non-browser usage is Node.js.
JavaScript is a high-level, often just-in-time–compiled language that conforms to the ECMAScript standard. It has dynamic typing, prototype-based object-orientation, and first-class functions. It is multi-paradigm, supporting event-driven, functional, and imperative programming styles. It has application programming interfaces (APIs) for working with text, dates, regular expressions, standard data structures, and the Document Object Model (DOM). (Full article...) -
Yoshua Bengio OC OQ FRS FRSC (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the AI institute MILA.
Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing", together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, for their foundational work on deep learning. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI". Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist globally (by both total citations and by h-index), and the most-cited living scientist across all fields (by total citations). In 2024, TIME Magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the world's 100 most influential people. (Full article...) -
Julia is a dynamic general-purpose programming language. As a high-level language, distinctive aspects of Julia's design include a type system with parametric polymorphism, the use of multiple dispatch as a core programming paradigm, just-in-time (JIT) compilation and a parallel garbage collection implementation. Notably Julia does not support classes with encapsulated methods but instead relies on the types of all of a function's arguments to determine which method will be called.
By default, Julia is run similarly to scripting languages, using its runtime, and allows for interactions, but Julia programs/source code can also optionally be sent to users in one ready-to-install/run file, which can be made quickly, not needing anything preinstalled.
Julia programs can reuse libraries from other languages (or itself be reused from other); Julia has a special no-boilerplate keyword allowing calling e.g. C, Fortran or Rust libraries, and e.g. PythonCall.jl uses it indirectly for you, and Julia (libraries) can also be called from other languages, e.g. Python and R, and several Julia packages have been made easily available from those languages, in the form of Python and R libraries for corresponding Julia packages. Calling in either direction has been implemented for many languages, not just those and C++. (Full article...) -
Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar. He was a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 and adopted shortly afterwards. He attended Reed College in 1972 before withdrawing that same year. In 1974, he traveled through India, seeking enlightenment before later studying Zen Buddhism. He and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to further develop and sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Together, the duo gained fame and wealth a year later with production and sale of the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers.
Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to the development of the largely unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI. The Macintosh launched the desktop publishing industry in 1985 (for example, the Aldus Pagemaker) with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics and PostScript. (Full article...) -
The source code for a computer program in C. The gray lines are comments that explain the program to humans. When compiled and run, it will give the output "Hello, world!".
A programming language is an artificial language for expressing computer programs.
Programming languages typically allow software to be written in a human readable manner.
Execution of a program requires an implementation. There are two main approaches for implementing a programming language – compilation, where programs are compiled ahead-of-time to machine code, and interpretation, where programs are directly executed. In addition to these two extremes, some implementations use hybrid approaches such as just-in-time compilation and bytecode interpreters. (Full article...) -
Haskell (/ˈhæskəl/) is a general-purpose, statically typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Haskell pioneered several programming language features such as type classes, which enable type-safe operator overloading, and monadic input/output (IO). It is named after logician Haskell Curry. Haskell's main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC).
Haskell's semantics are historically based on those of the Miranda programming language, which served to focus the efforts of the initial Haskell working group. The last formal specification of the language was made in July 2010, while the development of GHC continues to expand Haskell via language extensions.
Haskell is used in academia and industry. As of May 2021[update], Haskell was the 28th most popular programming language by Google searches for tutorials, and made up less than 1% of active users on the GitHub source code repository. (Full article...) -
F# (pronounced F sharp) is a general-purpose, high-level, strongly typed, multi-paradigm programming language that encompasses functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming methods. It is most often used as a cross-platform Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) language on .NET, but can also generate JavaScript and graphics processing unit (GPU) code.
F# is developed by the F# Software Foundation, Microsoft and open contributors. An open source, cross-platform compiler for F# is available from the F# Software Foundation. F# is a fully supported language in Visual Studio and JetBrains Rider. Plug-ins supporting F# exist for many widely used editors including Visual Studio Code, Vim, and Emacs.
F# is a member of the ML language family and originated as a .NET Framework implementation of a core of the programming language OCaml. It has also been influenced by C#,
Python, Haskell, Scala and Erlang. (Full article...) -
Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation.
Python is dynamically type-checked and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including structured (particularly procedural), object-oriented and functional programming.
Guido van Rossum began working on Python in the late 1980s as a successor to the ABC programming language. Python 3.0, released in 2008, was a major revision not completely backward-compatible with earlier versions. Recent versions, such as Python 3.12, have added capabilites and keywords for typing (and more; e.g. increasing speed); helping with (optional) static typing. Currently only versions in the 3.x series are supported. (Full article...) -
D, also known as dlang, is a multi-paradigm system programming language created by Walter Bright at Digital Mars and released in 2001. Andrei Alexandrescu joined the design and development effort in 2007. Though it originated as a re-engineering of C++, D is now a very different language. As it has developed, it has drawn inspiration from other high-level programming languages. Notably, it has been influenced by Java, Python, Ruby, C#, and Eiffel.
The D language reference describes it as follows: (Full article...) -
C# (/ˌsiː ˈʃɑːrp/ see SHARP) is a general-purpose high-level programming language supporting multiple paradigms. C# encompasses static typing, strong typing, lexically scoped, imperative, declarative, functional, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines.
The principal inventors of the C# programming language were Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Wiltamuth, and Peter Golde from Microsoft. It was first widely distributed in July 2000 and was later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) in 2002 and ISO/IEC (ISO/IEC 23270 and 20619) in 2003. Microsoft introduced C# along with .NET Framework and Microsoft Visual Studio, both of which are technically speaking, closed-source. At the time, Microsoft had no open-source products. Four years later, in 2004, a free and open-source project called Microsoft Mono began, providing a cross-platform compiler and runtime environment for the C# programming language. A decade later, Microsoft released Visual Studio Code (code editor), Roslyn (compiler), and the unified .NET platform (software framework), all of which support C# and are free, open-source, and cross-platform. Mono also joined Microsoft but was not merged into .NET.
As of January 2025,[update] the most recent stable version of the language is C# 13.0, which was released in 2024 in .NET 9.0 (Full article...) -
In computing, a compiler is software that translates computer code written in one programming language (the source language) into another language (the target language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a low-level programming language (e.g. assembly language, object code, or machine code) to create an executable program.
There are many different types of compilers which produce output in different useful forms. A cross-compiler produces code for a different CPU or operating system than the one on which the cross-compiler itself runs. A bootstrap compiler is often a temporary compiler, used for compiling a more permanent or better optimized compiler for a language.
Related software include decompilers, programs that translate from low-level languages to higher level ones; programs that translate between high-level languages, usually called source-to-source compilers or transpilers; language rewriters, usually programs that translate the form of expressions without a change of language; and compiler-compilers, compilers that produce compilers (or parts of them), often in a generic and reusable way so as to be able to produce many differing compilers. (Full article...) -
tcsh and sh shell windows on a Mac OS X Leopard desktop
A Unix shell is a shell that provides a command-line user interface for a Unix-like operating system. A Unix shell provides a command language that can be used either interactively or for writing a shell script. A user typically interacts with a Unix shell via a terminal emulator; however, direct access via serial hardware connections or Secure Shell are common for server systems. Although use of a Unix shell is popular with some users, others prefer to use a windowing system such as desktop Linux distribution or macOS instead of a command-line interface.
A user may have access to multiple Unix shells with one configured to run by default when the user logs in interactively. The default selection is typically stored in a user's profile; for example, in the local passwd file or in a distributed configuration system such as NIS or LDAP. A user may use other shells nested inside the default shell.
A Unix shell may provide many features including: variable definition and substitution, command substitution, filename wildcarding, stream piping, control flow structures (condition-testing and iteration), working directory context, and here document. (Full article...)
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Bill Gosper's Glider Gun in action -
Deep Blue was a chess-playing expert system run on a unique purpose-built IBM supercomputer. It was the first computer to win a game, and the first to win a match, against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. Photo taken at the Computer History Museum. -
Partial view of the Mandelbrot set. Step 1 of a zoom sequence: Gap between the "head" and the "body" also called the "seahorse valley". -
Grace Hopper at the UNIVAC keyboard, c. 1960. Grace Brewster Murray: American mathematician and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy who was a pioneer in developing computer technology, helping to devise UNIVAC I. the first commercial electronic computer, and naval applications for COBOL (common-business-oriented language). -
GNOME Shell, GNOME Clocks, Evince, gThumb and GNOME Files at version 3.30, in a dark theme -
A view of the GNU nano Text editor version 6.0 -
Animation of a Non-uniform rational B-spline surface. Modeled and rendered in Cobalt. -
An IBM Port-A-Punch punched card -
A lone house. An image made using Blender 3D. -
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Margaret Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Project. -
Output from a (linearised) shallow water equation model of water in a bathtub. The water experiences 5 splashes which generate surface gravity waves that propagate away from the splash locations and reflect off of the bathtub walls. -
A head crash on a modern hard disk drive -
Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. -
Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and in theoretical physics. -
This image (when viewed in full size, 1000 pixels wide) contains 1 million pixels, each of a different color. -
Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognize that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer.
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Did you know? -
- ... that the 2024 psychological horror game Mouthwashing utilises non-diegetic scene transitions that mimic glitches and crashes?
- ... that according to the Open Syllabus Project, Diana Hacker is the second most-read female author on college campuses after Kate L. Turabian?
- ... that it took a particle accelerator and machine-learning algorithms to extract the charred text of PHerc. Paris. 4 without unrolling it?
- ... that both Thackeray and Longfellow bought paintings by Fanny Steers?
- ... that the programming language Acorn System BASIC was so non-standard that one commenter suggested that using it on the BBC Micro would be a disaster?
- ... that NATO was once targeted by a group of "gay furry hackers"?
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