Long before you were picking up Python and JavaScript, in the predawn darkness of May 1, 1964, a modest but pivotal moment in computing history unfolded at Dartmouth College. Mathematicians John G.

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.

Invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system 50 ...

Why shouldn’t those “interfaces” be humanely designed? Let that sink in. Programming languages are tools, designed by people for a specific purpose. What this study showed is that the design of this ...

No, HTML is not a computer programming language. This may ruffle the feathers of web developers and graphic designers who take pride in the webpages they have built. Nevertheless, HTML is not a ...

Spanish, French, German — or JavaScript? An Albuquerque state senator is pushing for computer programming to be counted as a foreign language under New Mexico’s public school academic requirements.

So we ended last episode with programming at the hardware level with things like plugboards and huge panels of switches, but what was really needed was a more versatile way to program computers - ...

Maddy Petrovich, 14, of Wellesley, Mass. first started learning how to use the programming language Scratch when she was 10 years old. (Jesse Costa/WBUR) At a time when parents are eager to give their ...

As we pointed out earlier this week, we’re still far from being able to replicate the awesome power of the human brain. So rather than use traditional models of computing, IBM has decided to design an ...

In a Fireside Hangout on Google+ Thursday afternoon, President Obama spoke about the possibility of implementing a computer programming language requirement in American high schools. The statement was ...