JavaScript’s arrays can hold heterogeneous types, change size on the fly, and readily insert or remove elements. Traditional methods like slice, splice, and push/pop do this by operating on the array ...

How do you support 450 million users with only 32 engineers? For WhatsApp, acquired earlier this week by Facebook, the answer is Erlang, a programming language developed in the ’80s that is finally ...

One of the challenges for people pursuing a career in programming is deciding which languages to learn. With so many languages used for different purposes, choosing the ones you want to study will ...

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 ...

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 ...

We ran a piece last year summarizing an IEEE study of programming-language popularity based on job listings. This article fostered conversation, including debates about whether the languages IEEE used ...