Assembly
1949Assembly language is the thin layer between human-readable code and raw machine instructions. Every program, regardless …
Unearthing programming languages from the popular to the obscure
Discover how languages old and new still run on modern machines — macOS, Windows, and Docker. From FORTRAN to Rust, every language has a story to tell.
// 1957 - FORTRAN
WRITE(*,*) 'Hello, World!'
// 1972 - C
printf("Hello, World!\n");
// 1995 - Java
System.out.println("Hello!");
// 2015 - Rust
println!("Hello, World!");Start your journey through programming history
Assembly language is the thin layer between human-readable code and raw machine instructions. Every program, regardless …
Java is one of the most influential programming languages ever created. Designed with the philosophy of “Write …
BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming …
Carbon is an experimental programming language designed at Google as a potential successor to C++. Announced publicly in …
C is arguably the most influential programming language ever created. Developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs, …
Fortran (FORmula TRANslation) holds a unique place in computing history as the first widely adopted high-level …
Recent explorations and discoveries
pine (パイン, short for 'programming in the net') was a small, PHP-flavoured, browser-based scripting language written by a Japanese hobbyist known only as 'uechi' for their own make-a-program website, mkprog.jp. Its entire surviving public record is one 99 Bottles of Beer program submitted on 12 July 2012 and a single one-paragraph help page captured by the Wayback Machine; the site, the domain and the language itself have since vanished
Read more →Pointy is a six-instruction Turing tarpit posted to the Esolang wiki on 10 June 2006 by Sophie Swett (writing as Ihope127), in which 'the basic datatype is the pointer': every operand is a memory address, a value is read by prefixing it with *, and the only control flow is a decrement that jumps when it finds a zero. Marinus Oosters wrote a C interpreter and a 99 Bottles of Beer program for it in July 2006; the language has not changed since, and its master-list entry as a 2011 object-oriented web language is wrong on every count
Read more →A comprehensive catalog of 1,200+ programming languages from computing history, with dates, status, paradigms, and categories.
Read more →π ('a pattern language') is a research language from Roman Knöll and Mira Mezini's Software Technology Group at TU Darmstadt in which the only construct is the pattern: an EBNF-style syntax rule with an attached meaning, declared at run time and immediately usable as if it had always been part of the language. Grown out of the Pegasus naturalistic-programming project, presented in the Onward! track of OOPSLA 2009 in Orlando and released as a Java-based interpreter (the last announced version, 0.8, in January 2010), it aimed to be a language that is fully syntactically and semantically extensible from within itself - a language-design tool as much as a programming language. Its website has not changed since mid-2011
Read more →Pico is a tiny, dynamically typed, statically scoped 'Scheme for mere mortals' designed by Theo D'Hondt at the Programming Technology Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel to teach programming to first-year physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology students. It keeps Scheme's first-class-everything semantics (closures, continuations, reified programs, garbage collection) but replaces prefix notation with calculus-style infix syntax, replaces pairs with tables (arrays), and replaces special forms with an unusual call-by-function parameter-passing rule. Prototyped in Scheme in 1995 and re-implemented as an ANSI C virtual machine in 1997, it went on to serve as the substrate for VUB research languages such as Pic%, Borg and, indirectly, AmbientTalk. The last known release is a Linux packaging from January 2014
Read more →ParaSail (Parallel Specification and Implementation Language) is S. Tucker Taft's pointer-free, pervasively parallel object-oriented language: every parameter, every operand of an expression and every iteration of a for loop is evaluated in parallel unless the program says otherwise, and the compiler rejects any code where that could produce a race. Designed in public on a blog from September 2009, first released as an alpha interpreter in October 2011 by Taft's company SofCheck and carried on at AdaCore after the two merged in January 2012, it grew an LLVM compiler written in ParaSail itself, a static analyser, and sibling front ends (Sparkel, Javallel, Parython and an Ada 202X prototype) that share its virtual machine. The last packaged release was 9.3 in June 2021; the sources moved to GitHub in 2022 and still receive occasional commits
Read more →Every language guide includes working code examples, Docker images for instant setup, and progressive tutorials from Hello World to advanced topics.