Portal:Computer programming
The Computer Programming Portal
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...)
Selected articles -
SNOBOL ("StriNg Oriented and symBOlic Language") is a series of programming languages developed between 1962 and 1967 at AT&TBell Laboratories by David J. Farber, Ralph Griswold and Ivan P. Polonsky, culminating in SNOBOL4. It was one of a number of text-string-oriented languages developed during the 1950s and 1960s; others included COMIT and TRAC. Despite the similar name, it is entirely unlike COBOL.
SNOBOL4 stands apart from most programming languages of its era by having patterns as a first-class data type, a data type whose values can be manipulated in all ways permitted to any other data type in the programming language, and by providing operators for pattern concatenation and alternation. SNOBOL4 patterns are a type of object and admit various manipulations, much like later object-oriented languages such as JavaScript whose patterns are known as regular expressions. In addition SNOBOL4 strings generated during execution can be treated as programs and either interpreted or compiled and executed (as in the eval function of other languages).
SNOBOL4 was quite widely taught in larger U.S. universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was widely used in the 1970s and 1980s as a text manipulation language in the humanities. (Full article...).jpg/250px-Babbages_Analytical_Engine,_1834-1871._(9660574685).jpg)
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 digitalmechanicalgeneral-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...)- Forth is a stack-orientedprogramming language and interactive integrated development environment designed by Charles H. "Chuck" Moore and first used by other programmers in 1970. Although not an acronym, the language's name in its early years was often spelled in all capital letters as FORTH. The FORTH-79 and FORTH-83 implementations, which were not written by Moore, became de facto standards, and an official technical standard of the language was published in 1994 as ANS Forth. A wide range of Forth derivatives existed before and after ANS Forth. The free and open-source softwareGforth implementation is actively maintained, as are several commercially supported systems.
Forth typically combines a compiler with an integrated command shell, where the user interacts via subroutines called words. Words can be defined, tested, redefined, and debugged without recompiling or restarting the whole program. All syntactic elements, including variables, operators, and control flow, are defined as words. A stack is used to pass parameters between words, leading to a Reverse Polish notation style.
For much of Forth's existence, the standard technique was to compile to threaded code, which can be interpreted faster than bytecode. One of the early benefits of Forth was size: an entire development environment—including compiler, editor, and user programs—could fit in memory on an 8-bit or similarly limited system. No longer constrained by space, there are modern implementations that generate optimizedmachine code like other language compilers. The relative simplicity of creating a basic Forth system has led to many personal and proprietary variants, such as the custom Forth used to implement the bestselling 1986 video game Starflight from Electronic Arts. (Full article...)
Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield; born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist. She directed the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, where she led the development of the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer for the 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.
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...)
Yoshua BengioOC FRS FRSC (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian-French computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the AI institute 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 foundational work on deep learning. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI". Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist globally (by both total citations and by h-index), and the most-cited living scientist across all fields (by total citations). In 2024, TIME Magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the world's 100 most influential people. (Full article...)- Java is a high-level, general-purpose, memory-safe, object-orientedprogramming language. It is intended to let programmerswrite once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need to recompile. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. The Java runtime provides dynamic capabilities (such as reflection and runtime code modification) that are typically not available in traditional compiled languages.
Java gained popularity shortly after its release, and has been a popular programming language since then. Java was the third most popular programming language in 2022[update] according to GitHub. Although still widely popular, there has been a gradual decline in use of Java in recent years with other languages using JVM gaining popularity.
Java was designed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems. It was released in May 1995 as a core component of Sun's Java platform. The original and reference implementation Java compilers, virtual machines, and class libraries were released by Sun under proprietary licenses. As of May 2007, in compliance with the specifications of the Java Community Process, Sun had relicensed most of its Java technologies under the GPL-2.0-only license. Oracle, which bought Sun in 2010, offers its own HotSpot Java Virtual Machine. However, the official reference implementation is the OpenJDK JVM, which is open-source software used by most developers and is the default JVM for almost all Linux distributions. (Full article...) - Perl 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 Unixscripting 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; the sixth version's name was 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...) 
A Blender screenshot displaying the 3D test modelSuzanne
Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or typically in the context of film as computer generated imagery (CGI). The non-artistic aspects of computer graphics are the subject of computer science research.
Some topics in computer graphics include user interface design, sprite graphics, raster graphics, rendering, ray tracing, geometry processing, computer animation, vector graphics, 3D modeling, shaders, GPU design, implicit surfaces, visualization, scientific computing, image processing, computational photography, scientific visualization, computational geometry and computer vision, among others. The overall methodology depends heavily on the underlying sciences of geometry, optics, physics, and perception.
Computer graphics is responsible for displaying art and image data effectively and meaningfully to the consumer. It is also used for processing image data received from the physical world, such as photo and video content. Computer graphics development has had a significant impact on many types of media and has revolutionized animation, movies, advertising, and video games, in general. (Full article...)
The Antikythera mechanism (/ˌæntɪkɪˈθɪərə/AN-tik-ih-THEER-ə, US also /ˌæntaɪkɪˈ-/AN-ty-kih-) is an Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery (model of the Solar System). It is the oldest known example of an analogue computer. It could be 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.
The 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 led by Mike Edmunds used computer X-raytomography and high resolution scanning to image inside fragments of the crust-encased mechanism and read the faintest inscriptions that once covered the outer casing. These scans suggest that the mechanism 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...)- Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) is a graphical system design and developmentplatform produced and distributed by National Instruments, based on a programming environment that uses a visual programming language. It is widely used for data acquisition, instrument control, and industrial automation. It provides tools for designing and deploying complex test and measurement systems.
The visual (aka graphical) programming language is called "G" (not to be confused with G-code). It is a dataflow language originally developed by National Instruments. LabVIEW is supported on a variety of operating systems (OSs), including macOS and other versions of Unix and Linux, as well as Microsoft Windows.
The latest versions of LabVIEW are LabVIEW 2024 Q3 (released in July 2024) and LabVIEW NXG 5.1 (released in January 2021). National Instruments released the free for non-commercial use LabVIEW and LabVIEW NXG Community editions on April 28, 2020. (Full article...) - Prolog is a logic programming language that has its origins in artificial intelligence, automated theorem proving and computational linguistics.
Prolog has its roots in first-order logic, a formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is intended primarily as a declarative programming language: the program is a set of facts and rules, which define relations. A computation is initiated by running a query over the program.
Prolog was one of the first logic programming languages and remains the most popular such language today, with several free and commercial implementations available. The language has been used for theorem proving, expert systems, term rewriting, type systems, and automated planning, as well as its original intended field of use, natural language processing. (Full article...)
JavaScript (/ˈdʒɑːvəskrɪpt/ ⓘ), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior.
Web browsers have a dedicated JavaScript engine that executes the client code. These engines are also utilized in some servers and a variety of apps. The most popular runtime system for non-browser usage is Node.js.
JavaScript is a high-level, often just-in-time–compiled language that conforms to the ECMAScript standard. It has dynamic typing, prototype-basedobject-orientation, and first-class functions. It is multi-paradigm, supporting event-driven, functional, and imperativeprogramming styles. It has application programming interfaces (APIs) for working with text, dates, regular expressions, standard data structures, and the Document Object Model (DOM). (Full article...)
C++ (/ˈsiːplʌsplʌs/, pronounced "C plus plus" and sometimes abbreviated as CPP or CXX) is a high-level, general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup. First released in 1985 as an extension of the C programming language, adding object-oriented (OOP) features, it has since expanded significantly over time adding more OOP and other features; as of 1997[update]/C++98 standardization, C++ has added functional features, in addition to facilities for low-levelmemory manipulation for systems like microcomputers or to make operating systems like Linux or Windows, and even later came features like generic (template) programming. C++ is usually implemented as a compiled language, and many vendors provide C++ compilers, including the Free Software Foundation, LLVM, Microsoft, Intel, Embarcadero, Oracle, and IBM.
C++ was designed with systems programming and embedded, resource-constrained software and large systems in mind, with performance, efficiency, and flexibility of use as its design highlights. C++ has also been found useful in many other contexts, with key strengths being software infrastructure and resource-constrained applications, including desktop applications, video games, servers (e.g., e-commerce, web search, or databases), and performance-critical applications (e.g., telephone switches or space probes).
C++ is standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), with the latest standard version ratified and published by ISO in October 2024 as ISO/IEC 14882:2024 (informally known as C++23). The C++ programming language was initially standardized in 1998 as ISO/IEC 14882:1998, which was then amended by the C++03, C++11, C++14, C++17, and C++20 standards. The current C++23 standard supersedes these with new features and an enlarged standard library. Before the initial standardization in 1998, C++ was developed by Stroustrup at Bell Labs since 1979 as an extension of the C language; he wanted an efficient and flexible language similar to C that also provided high-level features for program organization. Since 2012, C++ has been on a three-year release schedule with C++26 as the next planned standard. (Full article...)- Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data and information processing, and storage. Information technology is an application of computer science and computer engineering.
The term is commonly used as a synonym for computers and computer networks, but it also encompasses other information distribution technologies such as television and telephones. Several products or services within an economy are associated with information technology, including computer hardware, software, electronics, semiconductors, internet, telecom equipment, and e-commerce.
An information technology system (IT system) is generally an information system, a communications system, or, more specifically speaking, a computer system — including all hardware, software, and peripheral equipment — operated by a limited group of IT users, and an IT project usually refers to the commissioning and implementation of an IT system. IT systems play a vital role in facilitating efficient data management, enhancing communication networks, and supporting organizational processes across various industries. Successful IT projects require meticulous planning and ongoing maintenance to ensure optimal functionality and alignment with organizational objectives. (Full article...) - In C++computer programming, allocators are a component of the C++ Standard Library. The standard library provides several data structures, such as list and set, commonly referred to as containers. A common trait among these containers is their ability to change size during the execution of the program. To achieve this, some form of dynamic memory allocation is usually required. Allocators handle all the requests for allocation and deallocation of memory for a given container. The C++ Standard Library provides general-purpose allocators that are used by default, however, custom allocators may also be supplied by the programmer.
Allocators were invented by Alexander Stepanov as part of the Standard Template Library (STL). They were originally intended as a means to make the library more flexible and independent of the underlying memory model, allowing programmers to utilize custom pointer and reference types with the library. However, in the process of adopting STL into the C++ standard, the C++ standardization committee realized that a complete abstraction of the memory model would incur unacceptable performance penalties. To remedy this, the requirements of allocators were made more restrictive. As a result, the level of customization provided by allocators is more limited than was originally envisioned by Stepanov.
Nevertheless, there are many scenarios where customized allocators are desirable. Some of the most common reasons for writing custom allocators include improving performance of allocations by using memory pools, and encapsulating access to different types of memory, like shared memory or garbage-collected memory. In particular, programs with many frequent allocations of small amounts of memory may benefit greatly from specialized allocators, both in terms of running time and memory footprint. (Full article...)
.jpg)
.jpg)
Selected images
A head crash on a modern hard disk drive
Animation of a Non-uniform rational B-spline surface. Modeled and rendered in Cobalt.
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.
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).
Partial view of the Mandelbrot set. Step 1 of a zoom sequence: Gap between the "head" and the "body" also called the "seahorse valley"._in_Dark_theme.png/120px-GNOME_Shell,_GNOME_Clocks,_Evince,_gThumb,_GNOME_Files_at_version_3.30_(2018-09)_in_Dark_theme.png)
GNOME Shell, GNOME Clocks, Evince, gThumb and GNOME Files at version 3.30, in a dark theme
A lone house. An image made using Blender 3D.
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.
An IBM Port-A-Punch punched card
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.
Margaret Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Project.
This image (when viewed in full size, 1000 pixels wide) contains 1 million pixels, each of a different color.
Bill Gosper's Glider Gun in action
Deep Blue was a chess-playingexpert system run on a unique purpose-built IBMsupercomputer. 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.
A view of the GNU nano Text editor version 6.0
_in_Dark_theme.png)
Did you know? -
- ... that the Gale–Shapley algorithm was used to assign medical students to residencies long before its publication by Gale and Shapley?
- ... that it took a particle accelerator and machine-learning algorithms to extract the charred text of PHerc. Paris. 4 without unrolling it?
- ... 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 a "hacker" with blog posts written by ChatGPT was at the center of an online scavenger hunt promoting Avenged Sevenfold's album Life Is but a Dream...?
- ... that the programming language Acorn System BASIC was so non-standard that one commenter suggested that using it on the BBC Micro would be a disaster?
- ... that Phil Fletcher as Hacker T. Dog caused Lauren Layfield to make the "most famous snort" in the United Kingdom in 2016?
Subcategories
Select [►] to view subcategories
WikiProjects
- There are many users interested in computer programming, join them.
Computer programming news
No recent news
Topics
Select [show] to view subtopics
Related portals
.svg/40px-Free_and_open-source_software_logo_(2009).svg.png){kind=logo}
Associated Wikimedia
The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:
Commons
Free media repository
Wikibooks
Free textbooks and manuals
Wikidata
Free knowledge base
Wikinews
Free-content news
Wikiquote
Collection of quotations
Wikisource
Free-content library
Wikiversity
Free learning tools
Wiktionary
Dictionary and thesaurus
Discover Wikipedia using portals
