The article surveys ten historically influential programming languages—COBOL, ALGOL, APL, BASIC, PL/I, SIMULA, Pascal, CLU, ML, and Smalltalk—explaining their original purposes, key technical contributions, reasons they fell out of mainstream use, and how their ideas continue to underpin today’s software ecosystems.
GCC 15 is slated for release in late April or early May, bringing a native COBOL frontend, default C23 support, early C++23/26 features, expanded RISC‑V capabilities, and a roadmap that still leaves Algol‑68 for future versions.
GNU COBOL has reached industrial maturity, offering cross‑platform compilation to C, high performance, and strong ISO compliance, making it a viable open‑source alternative to proprietary COBOL products for banks and other enterprises.
The February 2024 TIOBE index shows Go reaching a record‑high #8, while legacy languages Fortran and COBOL surge into the top‑20, and IBM unveils a generative‑AI tool to translate COBOL code to Java, highlighting the enduring relevance of older languages.
The January 2024 TIOBE Index reveals C# winning the 2023 Programming Language of the Year award, highlights Java’s market‑share loss and pricing controversy, showcases the rise of Kotlin, Fortran and COBOL, and offers expert predictions on which languages may break into the Top 20 next year.
The Open Mainframe Project's COBOL Working Group is gathering global usage data and industry perspectives to assess the continued strategic importance of COBOL, a 60‑year‑old business language still vital to many enterprises today.
Grace Hopper, the pioneering computer scientist and Navy rear admiral, revolutionized programming through her work on early computers, coined the term 'bug', developed the first compiler, and led the creation of COBOL, leaving a lasting legacy that still inspires technologists today.
This roundup covers Tencent Cloud's first domestic serverless PostgreSQL database, GitHub's free core features for all users, the nginx 1.17.10 release with a new auth_delay directive, a COBOL programmer's urgent call, and upcoming Linux dual‑boot on iPhone, among other tech headlines.
This article traces COBOL's 60‑year history, its enduring role in finance and government systems, and includes an interview with Micro Focus expert Rolf Becking who demonstrates a simple Hello World program and explains how the language remains relevant in cloud and modern architectures.
