For decades, fierce debates have raged over the benefits of different programming languages over others: Java vs. C++; Python vs. Ruby; Flask vs. Django. While often waged with fervor by computer ...

As an undergraduate, Rob Pike first read Brian Kernighan's book on the C programming language while home sick from classes at the University of Toronto. "I lay in bed and I read it cover to cover," ...

Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and it’s a shame more people don’t learn to do it. For years now, that’s been a hugely popular stance. It’s led to educational initiatives as ...

Bradley Beach Elementary School students Kasey Minsky, far left, and Thomas Sexsmith work on a program in their technology class. Microsoft founder Bill Gates got his first exposure at age 13.

So, the story goes something like this. In 1947, in Virginia, US, an error was spotted on the Harvard Mark II, one of the first programmable computers in the world. A ...

Twenty years ago, when I was at Princeton, I and all of my fellow graduate students in physics were required to pass two foreign-language achievement tests in order to get our degrees. Since then, ...

Computer scientists are building mathematical models to represent the safest and most effective ways to perform surgery, including tasks such as suturing, dissecting and joining tissue. Borrowing ...

You say puh-tay-tow, I say puh-tah-tow, but how did our ancestors use language millennia ago? Typically you’d ask a linguist, but manually reconstructing protolanguages — hypothetical early languages ...

If you are a very large, rich technology company today, it seems it is no longer enough to have your own humongous data centers, luxurious buses, and organic lunch bars. You need your very own ...

In the beginning, computer programmers translated their desires into the language of machines. Now, those machines are becoming conversant in the language of their programmers. OpenAI's newly released ...

The best class I took in college was on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Until that point, I had avoided philosophy of language as simply being too esoteric and hermetic to be of use. David Pears, ...