As an undergraduate, Rob Pike first read Brian Kernighan's book on the C programming language while home sick from classes at the University of Toronto. "I lay in bed and I read it cover to cover," ...

Why do we build radios or clocks when you can buy them? Why do we make LEDs blink for no apparent purpose? Why do we try to squeeze one extra frame out of our video cards? We don’t know why, but we do ...

Romera-Paredes and colleagues’ work is the latest step in a long line of research that attempts to create programs automatically by taking inspiration from biological evolution, a field called genetic ...

No, HTML is not a computer programming language. This may ruffle the feathers of web developers and graphic designers who take pride in the webpages they have built. Nevertheless, HTML is not a ...

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust. Many software projects emerge because—somewhere out there—a programmer had a personal problem to solve. That’s more or ...

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 ...

Once we’ve built a computer, the next step is to develop an assembly language and then an assembler that can assemble our programs. In my previous column, we introduced the concept of the big-endian ...

We’ve come to the point where we need to define an assembly language for our 4-Bit HRRG Computer, but first we need to consider certain concepts. These days, we are used to programming our computers ...