The other day, my friend Ned’s cousin asked Ned what he thought was the best first language for new programmers. The cousin didn’t have much computing experience, but at 15 years old the future was ...

Computers need programming languages to function. That’s just a simple fact of life. However, these languages didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. They were developed by people for explicit purposes.

Did you know that, between 1976 and 1978, Microsoft developed its own version of the BASIC programming language? It was initially called Altair BASIC before becoming Microsoft BASIC, and it was ...

A few days ago I wrote a post about what programming language you should learn first for a career in programming. This sparked a lot of conversation (much of it on Google+ submitted without reading ...

When I was new to programming, I focused way too much on learning the syntax, especially the brackets, the semicolons, and ...

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 ...