I was 5 or 6 when I got my first sense of the joys of computer programming. This was in the early 1980s, when few people had a computer. One day, my dad brought home a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of the ...

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 ...

By any measure, there is an enormous number of programming languages. Some lists contain hundreds, while the Historical Encyclopedia of Programming Languages lists just under 9,000. You’ve probably ...

In the late 1990s, a well respected and visionary colleague made the surprising statement, “Java is dead.” That is probably the first time I had heard that phrase. Despite my respect for his ...