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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Image 1COBOL (/ˈkoʊbɒl, -bɔːl/; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. Many large financial institutions were developing new systems in the language as late as 2006, but most programming in COBOL today is purely to maintain existing applications. Programs are being moved to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages or replaced with other software.
COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC designed by Grace Hopper. It was created as part of a U.S. Department of Defense effort to create a portable programming language for data processing. It was originally seen as a stopgap, but the Defense Department promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it, resulting in its widespread adoption. It was standardized in 1968 and has been revised five times. Expansions include support for structured and object-oriented programming. The current standard is ISO/IEC 1989:2023.
COBOL statements have prose syntax such asMOVE x TO y
, which was designed to be self-documenting and highly readable. However, it is verbose and uses over 300 reserved words. This contrasts with the succinct and mathematically inspired syntax of other languages (in this case,y = x;
). (Full article...) -
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In computer science and computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the description may include the instruction set architecture design, microarchitecture design, logic design, and implementation. (Full article...) -
Image 3Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".
Perl was developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions. Perl originally was not capitalized and the name was changed to being capitalized by the time Perl 4 was released. The latest release is Perl 5, first released in 1994. From 2000 to October 2019 a sixth version of Perl was in development, before the latter's name was officially changed to Raku. Both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams which liberally borrow ideas from each other.
Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C, sh, AWK, and sed. It provides text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix command line tools. Perl is a highly expressive programming language: source code for a given algorithm can be short and highly compressible. (Full article...) -
Image 4Object Pascal is an extension to the programming language Pascal that provides object-oriented programming (OOP) features such as classes and methods.
The language was originally developed by Apple Computer as Clascal for the Lisa Workshop development system. As Lisa gave way to Macintosh, Apple collaborated with Niklaus Wirth, the author of Pascal, to develop an officially standardized version of Clascal. This was renamed Object Pascal. Through the mid-1980s, Object Pascal was the main programming language for early versions of the MacApp application framework. The language lost its place as the main development language on the Mac in 1991 with the release of the C++-based MacApp 3.0. Official support ended in 1996.
Symantec also developed a compiler for Object Pascal for their Think Pascal product, which could compile programs much faster than Apple's own Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW). Symantec then developed the Think Class Library (TCL), based on MacApp concepts, which could be called from both Object Pascal and THINK C. The Think suite largely displaced MPW as the main development platform on the Mac in the late 1980s. (Full article...) -
Image 5In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the source language) into another language (the target language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a low-level programming language (e.g. assembly language, object code, or machine code) to create an executable program.
There are many different types of compilers which produce output in different useful forms. A cross-compiler produces code for a different CPU or operating system than the one on which the cross-compiler itself runs. A bootstrap compiler is often a temporary compiler, used for compiling a more permanent or better optimised compiler for a language.
Related software include decompilers, programs that translate from low-level languages to higher level ones; programs that translate between high-level languages, usually called source-to-source compilers or transpilers; language rewriters, usually programs that translate the form of expressions without a change of language; and compiler-compilers, compilers that produce compilers (or parts of them), often in a generic and reusable way so as to be able to produce many differing compilers. (Full article...) -
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Linus Benedict Torvalds (/ˈliːnəs ˈtɔːrvɔːldz/ LEE-nəs TOR-vawldz, Finland Swedish: [ˈliːnʉs ˈtuːrvɑlds] ⓘ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. He also created the distributed version control system Git.
He was honored, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel." He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award and the 2018 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award. (Full article...) -
Image 7Go is a statically typed, compiled high-level programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It is syntactically similar to C, but also has memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency. It is often referred to as Golang because of its former domain name,
golang.org
, but its proper name is Go.
There are two major implementations:- Google's self-hosting "gc" compiler toolchain, targeting multiple operating systems and WebAssembly.
- gofrontend, a frontend to other compilers, with the libgo library. With GCC the combination is gccgo; with LLVM the combination is gollvm.
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Haskell (/ˈhæskəl/) is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research, and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming language features such as type classes, which enable type-safe operator overloading, and monadic input/output (IO). It is named after logician Haskell Curry. Haskell's main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC).
Haskell's semantics are historically based on those of the Miranda programming language, which served to focus the efforts of the initial Haskell working group. The last formal specification of the language was made in July 2010, while the development of GHC continues to expand Haskell via language extensions.
Haskell is used in academia and industry. , Haskell was the 28th most popular programming language by Google searches for tutorials, and made up less than 1% of active users on the GitHub source code repository. (Full article...) -
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Yoshua Bengio OC FRS FRSC (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA).
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 work on deep learning. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning". As of May 2023, he has the highest h-index of any computer scientist. (Full article...) -
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Ruby is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including primitive data types. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan.
Ruby is dynamically typed and uses garbage collection and just-in-time compilation. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming. According to the creator, Ruby was influenced by Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, BASIC, Java, and Lisp. (Full article...) -
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The Antikythera mechanism (/ˌæntɪˈkɪθɪərə/ AN-tih-KIH-ther-ə) is an Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery (model of the Solar System), described as the oldest known example of an analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. It could also be used to track the four-year cycle of athletic games similar to an Olympiad, the cycle of the ancient Olympic Games.
This artefact was among wreckage retrieved from a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera in 1901. In 1902, it was identified by archaeologist Valerios Stais as containing a gear. The device, housed in the remains of a wooden-framed case of (uncertain) overall size 34 cm × 18 cm × 9 cm (13.4 in × 7.1 in × 3.5 in), was found as one lump, later separated into three main fragments which are now divided into 82 separate fragments after conservation efforts. Four of these fragments contain gears, while inscriptions are found on many others. The largest gear is about 13 cm (5 in) in diameter and originally had 223 teeth. All these fragments of the mechanism are kept at the National Archaeological Museum, Athens, along with reconstructions and replicas, to demonstrate how it may have looked and worked.
In 2005, a team from Cardiff University used computer x-ray tomography and high resolution scanning to image inside fragments of the crust-encased mechanism and read the faintest inscriptions that once covered the outer casing. This suggests it had 37 meshing bronze gears enabling it to follow the movements of the Moon and the Sun through the zodiac, to predict eclipses and to model the irregular orbit of the Moon, where the Moon's velocity is higher in its perigee than in its apogee. This motion was studied in the 2nd century BC by astronomer Hipparchus of Rhodes, and he may have been consulted in the machine's construction. There is speculation that a portion of the mechanism is missing and it calculated the positions of the five classical planets. The inscriptions were further deciphered in 2016, revealing numbers connected with the synodic cycles of Venus and Saturn. (Full article...) -
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Erlang (/ˈɜːrlæŋ/ UR-lang) is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional high-level programming language, and a garbage-collected runtime system. The term Erlang is used interchangeably with Erlang/OTP, or Open Telecom Platform (OTP), which consists of the Erlang runtime system, several ready-to-use components (OTP) mainly written in Erlang, and a set of design principles for Erlang programs.
The Erlang runtime system is designed for systems with these traits:- Distributed
- Fault-tolerant
- Soft real-time
- Highly available, non-stop applications
- Hot swapping, where code can be changed without stopping a system.
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Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language created by Chris Lattner in 2010 for Apple Inc. and maintained by the open-source community. Swift compiles to machine code, as it is an LLVM-based compiler. Swift was first released in June 2014, and the Swift toolchain has shipped in Xcode since version 6, released in 2014.
Apple intended Swift to support many core concepts associated with Objective-C, notably dynamic dispatch, widespread late binding, extensible programming, and similar features, but in a "safer" way, making it easier to catch software bugs; Swift has features addressing some common programming errors like null pointer dereferencing and provides syntactic sugar to help avoid the pyramid of doom. Swift supports the concept of protocol extensibility, an extensibility system that can be applied to types, structs and classes, which Apple promotes as a real change in programming paradigms they term "protocol-oriented programming" (similar to traits and type classes).
Swift was introduced at Apple's 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). It underwent an upgrade to version 1.2 during 2014 and a major upgrade to Swift 2 at WWDC 2015. Initially a proprietary language, version 2.2 was made open-source software under the Apache License 2.0 on December 3, 2015, for Apple's platforms and Linux. (Full article...) -
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Charles Babbage KH FRS (/ˈbæbɪdʒ/; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.
Babbage is considered by some to be "father of the computer". He is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, that eventually led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in his Analytical Engine, programmed using a principle openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom. Babbage had a broad range of interests in addition to his work on computers covered in his 1832 book Economy of Manufactures and Machinery. He was an important figure in the social scene in London, and is credited with importing the "scientific soirée" from France with his well-attended Saturday evening soirées. His varied work in other fields has led him to be described as "pre-eminent" among the many polymaths of his century.
Babbage, who died before the complete successful engineering of many of his designs, including his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, remained a prominent figure in the ideating of computing. Parts of his incomplete mechanisms are on display in the Science Museum in London. In 1991, a functioning difference engine was constructed from the original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked. (Full article...) -
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Stephen Gary Wozniak (/ˈwɒzniæk/; born August 11, 1950), also known by his nickname "Woz", is an American electrical engineer, computer programmer, philanthropist, and inventor. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Computer with his early business partner Steve Jobs. Through his work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he is widely recognized as one of the most prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.
In 1975, Wozniak started developing the Apple I into the computer that launched Apple when he and Jobs first began marketing it the following year. He primarily designed the Apple II, introduced in 1977, known as one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers, while Jobs oversaw the development of its foam-molded plastic case and early Apple employee Rod Holt developed its switching power supply. With human–computer interface expert Jef Raskin, Wozniak had a major influence over the initial development of the original Apple Macintosh concepts from 1979 to 1981, when Jobs took over the project following Wozniak's brief departure from the company due to a traumatic airplane accident. After permanently leaving Apple in 1985, Wozniak founded CL 9 and created the first programmable universal remote, released in 1987. He then pursued several other businesses and philanthropic ventures throughout his career, focusing largely on technology in K–12 schools.
As of February 2020, Wozniak has remained an employee of Apple in a ceremonial capacity since stepping down in 1985. In recent years, he has helped fund multiple entrepreneurial efforts dealing in areas such as GPS and telecommunications, flash memory, technology and pop culture conventions, technical education, ecology, satellites and more. (Full article...)
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Image 1A lone house. An image made using Blender 3D.
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Image 3A view of the GNU nano Text editor version 6.0
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Image 4Ada 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.
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Image 5Stephen 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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Image 6Grace 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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Image 9Deep 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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Image 10An IBM Port-A-Punch punched card
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Image 11Margaret Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Project.
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Image 12Partial 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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Image 13Partial view of the Mandelbrot set. Step 1 of a zoom sequence: Gap between the "head" and the "body" also called the "seahorse valley".
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Image 14GNOME Shell, GNOME Clocks, Evince, gThumb and GNOME Files at version 3.30, in a dark theme
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Image 15This image (when viewed in full size, 1000 pixels wide) contains 1 million pixels, each of a different color.
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Image 16A head crash on a modern hard disk drive
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Image 18Output 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.
Did you know? - load more entries
- ... that Guy Parmelin, now President of Switzerland, opened the study program of cyber security of the Lucerne School of Information Technology in 2018?
- ... that the software-testing framework pytest has been described as a key ecosystem project for the Python programming language?
- ... that Cornell University's student-oriented programming language dialect was made available to other universities but required a "research grant" payment in exchange?
- ... that a pink skin for Mercy in the video game Overwatch helped raise more than $12 million for breast cancer research?
- ... that the study of selection algorithms has been traced to an 1883 work of Lewis Carroll on how to award second place in single-elimination tournaments?
- ... that Earth 300 has designed a climate research vessel that would include a molten salt reactor and a quantum computer?
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