Programming languages are tools that help developers communicate with computers and build everything from apps to AI systems.

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.

The Java language and virtual machine are almost two decades old, and while most developers would recognize the old and new models of Java as being related, there's no question that Java has changed ...

For decades, fierce debates have raged over the benefits of different programming languages over others: Java vs. C++; Python vs. Ruby; Flask vs. Django. While often waged with fervor by computer ...

For the rest of the history of modern programming languages -- because C was really just the beginning! -- check out the infographic below. You can click it to zoom in.

(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.) It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone ...