Portal:Computer programming
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The Computer Programming Portal
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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An illustration of the linking process. Object files and static libraries are assembled into a new library or executable
A linker or link editor is a computer program that combines intermediate software build files such as object and library files into a single executable file such as a program or library. A linker is often part of a toolchain that includes a compiler and/or assembler that generates intermediate files that the linker processes. The linker may be integrated with other toolchain tools such that the user does not interact with the linker directly.
A simpler version that writes its output directly to memory is called the loader, though loading is typically considered a separate process. (Full article...) -
Yoshua Bengio OC OQ OBE 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 co-president and scientific director of the nonprofit LawZero. He founded Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute, and was its scientific director until 2025.
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 November 2025, Bengio became the first AI researcher with more than a million Google Scholar citations. In 2024, Time magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the world's 100 most influential people. (Full article...) -
Scala (/ˈskɑːlɑː/ SKAH-lah) is a strongly statically typed high-level general-purpose programming language that supports both object-oriented programming and functional programming. Designed to be concise, many of Scala's design decisions are intended to address criticism of Java.
Scala source code can be compiled to JVM bytecode and run on a Java virtual machine (JVM). Scala can also be transpiled to JavaScript to run in a browser, or compiled directly to a native executable using Clang. When running on the JVM, Scala provides language interoperability with Java so that libraries written in either language may be referenced directly in Scala or Java code. Like Java, Scala is object-oriented, and uses a syntax termed curly-brace which is similar to the language C. Since Scala 3, there is also an option to use the off-side rule (indenting) to structure blocks, and its use is advised. Martin Odersky has said that this turned out to be the most productive change introduced in Scala 3.
Unlike Java, Scala has many features of functional programming languages (like Scheme, Standard ML, and Haskell), including currying, immutability, lazy evaluation, and pattern matching. It also has an advanced type system supporting algebraic data types, covariance and contravariance, higher-order types (but not higher-rank types), anonymous types, operator overloading, optional parameters, named parameters, raw strings, and an experimental exception-only version of algebraic effects that can be seen as a more powerful version of Java's checked exceptions. (Full article...) -
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Following Microsoft's initial public offering in 1986 and the subsequent increase in its stock price, Gates became the world's then-youngest billionaire in 1987, at age 31. Forbes magazine ranked him as the world's wealthiest person in their The World's Billionaires list for 18 out of 24 years between 1995 and 2017, including 13 years consecutively from 1995 to 2007. Gates became the first centibillionaire in 1999, when his net worth briefly surpassed US$100 billion. According to Forbes, as of July 2026, his net worth stood at US$106.5 billion, making him the 19th-wealthiest individual in the world.
Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Gates was privately educated at Lakeside School, where he befriended Allen and developed his computing interests. In 1973, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he took classes including Math 55 and graduate-level computer science courses, but he dropped out in 1975 to co-found and lead Microsoft. He served as its CEO for the next 25 years and also became president and chairman of the board when the company was incorporated in 1981. Succeeded as CEO by Steve Ballmer in 2000, he transitioned to chief software architect, a position he held until 2008. He stepped down as chairman of the board in 2014 and became technology adviser to CEO Satya Nadella and other Microsoft leaders, a position he still holds. He resigned from the board in 2020.
Over time, Gates reduced his role at Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charitable organization, which he and his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, co-chaired from 2000 until 2024. Focusing on areas including health, education, and poverty alleviation, Gates became known for his efforts to combat transmissible diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and polio. After French Gates resigned as co-chair following the couple's divorce, the foundation was renamed the Gates Foundation, with Gates as its sole chair. (Full article...) -
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of research in engineering, mathematics, and computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals.
High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines, chatbots, virtual assistants, autonomous vehicles, and play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go). Since the 2020s, generative AI has become widely available to generate images, audio, and videos from text prompts.
The traditional goals of AI research include learning, reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, natural language processing, and perception, as well as support for robotics. To reach these goals, AI researchers use techniques including state space search and mathematical optimization, formal logic, artificial neural networks, and methods based on statistics, operations research, and economics. AI also draws upon psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields. Some companies, such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta, aim to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI that can complete nearly any cognitive task at least as well as a human. (Full article...) -
Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, and object-oriented high-level programming language, inspired by Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for design by contract (DbC), extremely strong typing, explicit concurrency, tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors. Ada is an international technical standard, jointly defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). As of May 2023[update], the standard, ISO/IEC 8652:2023, is called Ada 2022 informally.
Ada was originally designed by a team led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah of Honeywell under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede over 450 programming languages then used by the DoD. Ada was named after Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who has been credited as the first computer programmer. (Full article...) -
Printing mechanism from Babbage's analytical engine, as displayed at the Science Museum, London
The analytical engine was a proposed digital mechanical general-purpose computer designed by the English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, which was a design for a simpler mechanical calculator.
The analytical engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. In other words, the structure of the analytical engine was essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in the electronic era.
Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding. Nonetheless, it is one of his most successful achievements. It was not until 1941 that Konrad Zuse built the first general-purpose computer, Z3, more than a century after Babbage had proposed the pioneering analytical engine. (Full article...) -
Logo since August 2012
Microsoft is a computer technology corporation founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States. It is best known for the Windows operating system, the Office productivity software suite, the Microsoft 365 subscription service, the Xbox video gaming brand, the Bing search engine, and the Azure cloud computing platform.
In 1980, Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM to bundle Microsoft's operating system with IBM computers; with that deal, IBM paid Microsoft a royalty for every sale. In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2. Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2. Windows eventually overshadowed OS/2 in terms of sales. When Microsoft launched several Windows versions in the 1990s, they had captured over 90% market share of the world's personal computers.
As of June 30, 2015, Microsoft has a global annual revenue of US$86.83 billion (~$112 billion in 2024) and 128,076 employees worldwide. It develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. (Full article...) -
A set of two 12-row/80-column punched cards (one blank, one used) from the mid-twentieth century
A punched card (also punch card) is a stiff paper-based medium used to store digital information via the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Developed over the 19th to 20th centuries, punched cards were widely used for data processing, the control of automated machines, and computing. Early applications included controlling weaving looms and recording census data.
Punched cards were widely used in the 20th century, where unit record machines, organized into data processing systems, used punched cards for data input, data output, and data storage. The IBM 12-row/80-column punched card format came to dominate the industry. Many early digital computers used punched cards as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data. Punched cards were used for decades before being replaced by magnetic-tape data storage. While punched cards are now obsolete as a storage medium, as of 2012[update], some voting machines still used punched cards to record votes.
Punched cards had a significant cultural impact in the 20th century. Their legacy persists in modern computing, influencing the 80-character line standard still present in some command-line interfaces and programming environments. (Full article...) -
Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) is a graphical system design and development platform produced and distributed by National Instruments, based on a programming environment that uses a visual programming language. It is widely used for data acquisition, instrument control, and industrial automation. It provides tools for designing and deploying complex test and measurement systems.
The visual (aka graphical) programming language is called "G" (not to be confused with G-code). It is a dataflow language originally developed by National Instruments. LabVIEW is supported on a variety of operating systems (OSs), including macOS and other versions of Unix and Linux, as well as Microsoft Windows.
The latest versions of LabVIEW are LabVIEW 2024 Q3 (released in July 2024) and LabVIEW NXG 5.1 (released in January 2021). National Instruments released the free for non-commercial use LabVIEW and LabVIEW NXG Community editions on April 28, 2020. (Full article...) -
In the C++ programming language, decltype (for "declared type") is a specifier keyword used to query the type of an expression. Introduced in C++11, its primary intended use is in generic programming, where it is often difficult, or even impossible, to express types that depend on template parameters.
As generic programming techniques became increasingly popular throughout the 1990s, the need for a type-deduction mechanism was recognized. Many compiler vendors implemented their own versions of the operator, typically calledtypeof, and some portable implementations with limited functionality, based on existing language features were developed. In 2002, Bjarne Stroustrup proposed that a standardized version of the operator be added to the C++ language, and suggested the name "decltype", to reflect that the operator would yield the "declared type" of an expression.decltype's semantics were designed to cater to both generic library writers and novice programmers. In general, the deduced type matches the type of the object or function exactly as declared in the source code. Like thesizeofoperator,decltype's operand is not evaluated. (Full article...) -
Forth is a stack-oriented programming language and interactive integrated development environment designed by Charles H. "Chuck" Moore and first used by other programmers in 1970. Although not an acronym, the language's name in its early years was often spelled in all capital letters as FORTH. The FORTH-79 and FORTH-83 implementations, which were not written by Moore, became de facto standards, and an official technical standard of the language was published in 1994 as ANS Forth. A wide range of Forth derivatives existed before and after ANS Forth. The free and open-source software Gforth implementation is actively maintained, as are several commercially supported systems.
Forth typically combines a compiler with an integrated command shell, where the user interacts via subroutines called words.
Words can be defined, tested, redefined, and debugged without recompiling or restarting the whole program. All syntactic elements, including variables, operators, and control flow, are defined as words. A stack is used to pass parameters between words, leading to a Reverse Polish notation style. (Full article...) -
SNOBOL (StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language) is a series of programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&T Bell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of a number of text-string-oriented languages developed during the 1950s and 1960s; others included COMIT and TRAC. Despite the similar name, it is entirely unlike COBOL.
SNOBOL4 stands apart from most programming languages of its era by having patterns as a first-class data type, a data type whose values can be manipulated in all ways permitted to any other data type in the programming language, and by providing operators for pattern concatenation and alternation. SNOBOL4 patterns are a type of object and admit various manipulations, much like later object-oriented languages such as JavaScript whose patterns are known as regular expressions. In addition SNOBOL4 strings generated during execution can be treated as programs and either interpreted or compiled and executed (as in the eval function of other languages).
SNOBOL4 was quite widely taught in larger U.S. universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was widely used in the 1970s and 1980s as a text manipulation language in the humanities. (Full article...) -
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. PHP was originally an abbreviation of Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive backronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter implemented as a module, a daemon or a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code—which may be any type of data, such as generated HTML or binary image data—can form the whole or part of an HTTP response. Various web template systems, web content management systems, and web frameworks exist that can be employed to orchestrate or facilitate the generation of that response. PHP can be used for programming tasks outside the web context, though non-web uses are rare. PHP code can also be directly executed from the command line.
The standard PHP interpreter, powered by the Zend Engine, is free software released under the PHP License. PHP has been widely ported and can be deployed on most web servers on a variety of operating systems and platforms. (Full article...) -
The Greek lowercase omega (ω) character is used to represent Null in database theory.
In the SQL database query language, null or NULL is a special marker used to indicate that a data value does not exist in the database. Introduced by the creator of the relational database model, E. F. Codd, SQL null serves to fulfill the requirement that all true relational database management systems (RDBMS) support a representation of "missing information and inapplicable information". Codd also introduced the use of the lowercase Greek omega (ω) symbol to represent null in database theory. In SQL,NULLis a reserved word used to identify this marker.
A null should not be confused with a value of 0. A null indicates a lack of a value, which is not the same as a zero value. For example, in the question "How many books does Adam own?", the answer may be "zero" (the number of books is known to be zero) or "null" (the number of books is not known). In a database table, the column reporting this answer would start with no value (marked by null), and it would not be updated with the value zero until it is ascertained that Adam owns no books.
In SQL, null is a marker, not a value. This usage differs from most programming languages, where a null value of a reference means it is not pointing to any object. (Full article...)
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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. -
A head crash on a modern hard disk drive -
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. -
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GNOME Shell, GNOME Clocks, Evince, gThumb and GNOME Files at version 3.30, in a dark theme -
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). -
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Margaret Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Project. -
Animation of a Non-uniform rational B-spline surface. Modeled and rendered in Cobalt. -
A lone house. An image made using Blender 3D. -
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. -
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Partial view of the Mandelbrot set. Step 1 of a zoom sequence: Gap between the "head" and the "body" also called the "seahorse valley". -
Bill Gosper's Glider Gun in action -
An IBM Port-A-Punch punched card -
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 view of the GNU nano Text editor version 6.0 -
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.
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- The Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade will restrict supplies of popular computers starting 27 May 2026. (Reporter)
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