Portal:Computer programming
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Sample of a computer program (a minified version of the BootstrapJS library) on a screen
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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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...) -
PDP-11 CPU board
Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), motherboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, and computer case. It includes external devices such as a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and speakers.
By contrast, software is the set of instructions that can be stored and run by hardware. Hardware is so-termed because it is hard or rigid with respect to changes, whereas software is soft because it is easy to change.
Hardware is typically directed by the software to execute any command or instruction. A combination of hardware and software forms a usable computing system, although other systems exist with only hardware. (Full article...) -
The IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer installation in 2007 at the Argonne Leadership Angela Yang Computing Facility located in the Argonne National Laboratory, in Lemont, Illinois, US
Fortran (/ˈfɔːrtræn/; formerly FORTRAN) is a third generation, compiled, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.
Fortran was originally developed by IBM. It first compiled correctly in 1958. Fortran computer programs have been written to support scientific and engineering applications, such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry. It is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.
Fortran has evolved through numerous versions and dialects. In 1966, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard for Fortran because new compilers would slightly change the syntax. Nonetheless, successive versions have added support for strings (Fortran 77), structured programming, array programming, modular programming, generic programming (Fortran 90), parallel computing (Fortran 95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003), and concurrent programming (Fortran 2008). (Full article...) -
Flowchart of using successive subtractions to find the greatest common divisor of number r and s
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm (/ˈælɡərɪðəm/ ⓘ) is a finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing calculations and data processing. More advanced algorithms can use conditionals to divert the code execution through various routes (referred to as automated decision-making) and deduce valid inferences (referred to as automated reasoning), achieving automation eventually. Using human characteristics as descriptors of machines in metaphorical ways was already practiced by Alan Turing with terms such as "memory", "search" and "stimulus".
In contrast, a heuristic is an approach to problem solving that may not be fully specified or may not guarantee correct or optimal results, especially in problem domains where there is no well-defined correct or optimal result. For example, social media recommender systems rely on heuristics in such a way that, although widely characterized as "algorithms" in 21st century popular media, cannot deliver correct results due to the nature of the problem.
As an effective method, an algorithm can be expressed within a finite amount of space and time and in a well-defined formal language for calculating a function. Starting from an initial state and initial input (perhaps empty), the instructions describe a computation that, when executed, proceeds through a finite number of well-defined successive states, eventually producing "output" and terminating at a final ending state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as randomized algorithms, incorporate random input. (Full article...) -
Object 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...) -
The history of artificial intelligence (AI) began in antiquity, with myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence or consciousness by master craftsmen. The seeds of modern AI were planted by philosophers who attempted to describe the process of human thinking as the mechanical manipulation of symbols. This work culminated in the invention of the programmable digital computer in the 1940s, a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning. This device and the ideas behind it inspired a handful of scientists to begin seriously discussing the possibility of building an electronic brain.
The field of AI research was founded at a workshop held on the campus of Dartmouth College, USA during the summer of 1956. Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for decades. Many of them predicted that a machine as intelligent as a human being would exist in no more than a generation, and they were given millions of dollars to make this vision come true.
Eventually, it became obvious that researchers had grossly underestimated the difficulty of the project. In 1974, in response to the criticism from James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from congress, the U.S. and British Governments stopped funding undirected research into artificial intelligence, and the difficult years that followed would later be known as an "AI winter". Seven years later, a visionary initiative by the Japanese Government inspired governments and industry to provide AI with billions of dollars, but by the late 1980s the investors became disillusioned and withdrew funding again. (Full article...) -
Structured Query Language (SQL) (/ˌɛsˌkjuːˈɛl/ ⓘ S-Q-L, often /ˈsiːkwəl/ "sequel" for historical reasons) is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling structured data, i.e., data incorporating relations among entities and variables.
Introduced in the 1970s, SQL offered two main advantages over older read–write APIs such as ISAM or VSAM. Firstly, it introduced the concept of accessing many records with one single command. Secondly, it eliminates the need to specify how to reach a record, i.e., with or without an index.
Originally based upon relational algebra and tuple relational calculus, SQL consists of many types of statements, which may be informally classed as sublanguages, commonly: Data query Language (DQL), Data Definition Language (DDL), Data Control Language (DCL), and Data Manipulation Language (DML). (Full article...) -
F# (pronounced F sharp) is a general-purpose, strongly typed, multi-paradigm programming language that encompasses functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming methods. It is most often used as a cross-platform Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) language on .NET, but can also generate JavaScript and graphics processing unit (GPU) code.
F# is developed by the F# Software Foundation, Microsoft and open contributors. An open source, cross-platform compiler for F# is available from the F# Software Foundation. F# is a fully supported language in Visual Studio and JetBrains Rider. Plug-ins supporting F# exist for many widely used editors including Visual Studio Code, Vim, and Emacs.
F# is a member of the ML language family and originated as a .NET Framework implementation of a core of the programming language OCaml. It has also been influenced by C#,
Python, Haskell, Scala and Erlang. (Full article...) -
Node.js is a cross-platform, open-source JavaScript runtime environment that can run on Windows, Linux, Unix, macOS, and more. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript engine, and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser.
Node.js lets developers use JavaScript to write command line tools and for server-side scripting. The ability to run JavaScript code on the server is often used to generate dynamic web page content before the page is sent to the user's web browser. Consequently, Node.js represents a "JavaScript everywhere" paradigm, unifying web-application development around a single programming language, as opposed to using different languages for the server- versus client-side programming.
Node.js has an event-driven architecture capable of asynchronous I/O. These design choices aim to optimize throughput and scalability in web applications with many input/output operations, as well as for real-time Web applications (e.g., real-time communication programs and browser games). (Full article...) -
Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield; born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She invented the term "software engineering", stating "I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process."
On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions. (Full article...) -
Portion of the calculating machine with a printing mechanism of the analytical engine, built by Charles Babbage, as displayed at the Science Museum (London)
The analytical engine was a proposed digital mechanical general-purpose computer designed by 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, 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. The analytical engine is one of the most successful achievements of Charles Babbage.
Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding. 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 in 1837. (Full article...) -
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...) -
D, also known as dlang, is a multi-paradigm system programming language created by Walter Bright at Digital Mars and released in 2001. Andrei Alexandrescu joined the design and development effort in 2007. Though it originated as a re-engineering of C++, D is now a very different language drawing inspiration from other high-level programming languages, notably Java, Python, Ruby, C#, and Eiffel.
The D language reference describes it as follows: (Full article...) -
Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum (born March 16, 1944), sometimes referred to by the handle ast, is an American–Dutch computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
He is the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like operating system for teaching purposes, and has written multiple computer science textbooks regarded as standard texts in the field. He regards his teaching job as his most important work. Since 2004 he has operated Electoral-vote.com, a website dedicated to analysis of polling data in federal elections in the United States. (Full article...) -
MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages.
Although MATLAB is intended primarily for numeric computing, an optional toolbox uses the MuPAD symbolic engine allowing access to symbolic computing abilities. An additional package, Simulink, adds graphical multi-domain simulation and model-based design for dynamic and embedded systems.
, MATLAB has more than four million users worldwide. They come from various backgrounds of engineering, science, and economics. , more than 5000 global colleges and universities use MATLAB to support instruction and research. (Full article...)
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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". -
A view of the GNU nano Text editor version 6.0 -
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. -
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. -
This image (when viewed in full size, 1000 pixels wide) contains 1 million pixels, each of a different color. -
A lone house. An image made using Blender 3D. -
GNOME Shell, GNOME Clocks, Evince, gThumb and GNOME Files at version 3.30, in a dark theme -
A head crash on a modern hard disk drive -
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. -
Bill Gosper's Glider Gun in action -
Margaret Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Project. -
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Animation of a Non-uniform rational B-spline surface. Modeled and rendered in Cobalt. -
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. -
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). -
An IBM Port-A-Punch punched card -
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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Did you know? -
- ... that the main menu for the 2006 video game Curious George looked so simple that a reviewer thought he had an unfinished version of the game?
- ... that the first official result for the TPC-C benchmark in 1992 was 54, and now stands at 707 million?
- ... that a pink skin for Mercy in the video game Overwatch helped raise more than $12 million for breast cancer research?
- ... that Rust has been named the "most loved programming language" every year for seven years since 2016 by annual surveys conducted by Stack Overflow?
- ... that the software-testing framework pytest has been described as a key ecosystem project for the Python programming language?
- ... that according to hacker Tillie Kottmann, most of her data breaches did not require much technical skill?
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