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.

Linguistics and computer science intertwined in the mid-20th century. Computers help linguists better understand and analyze languages and computer scientists use linguistics to advance programming.

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the ...

Software-testing firm Tiobe, which maintains a monthly tracker of the popularity of the vast array of programming languages available to software developers, has picked C++ as its programming language ...