I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

Over the past few weeks, we've been discussing programming language popularity here on ZDNET. Most recently, I aggregated data from nine different rankings to produce the ZDNET Index of Programming ...

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 ...

After inventing calculus, actuarial tables, and the mechanical calculator and coining the phrase “best of all possible worlds,” Gottfried Leibniz still felt his life’s work was incomplete. Since ...

Love it or hate it, Rust is taking the world of systems programming by storm. Here's a look at what's great, and not-so-great, about the so-called modern successor to C and C++. It seems a new ...