For years, the lingua franca for desktop computers was the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a.k.a. Basic. Essentially every PC had it, and just about anyone could learn to program ...

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 ...

Arguing about which programming language is the best one is a favorite pastime among software developers. The tricky part, of course, is defining a set of criteria for "best." With software ...

I have a specific problem that needs a solution. While it would be possible to call in someone more knowledgeable, I think this is a good pretext to actually learn some programming myself. I have a ...

Want to learn to code? Put down the math book. Practice those communication skills instead. New research from the University of Washington finds that a natural aptitude for learning languages is a ...

Machine learning and AI bring powerful new capabilities to business computing. Despite their complexity and extensive data and compute demands, ML and AI are fundamentally software development ...

BASIC creators John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. The mainframe isn’t the only technology hitting the ripe old age of 50 this year. On May 1st, the BASIC programming language, first developed by Dartmouth ...

Nowadays, "basic" has a very different and derogatory Urban Dictionary-style meaning. Fifty years ago on this very day, however, it was the name given to a new computer-programming language born in a ...