The Tower of Babel
Today's digital world is a reverse tower of Babel. It takes all sorts of different languages to build it. It is this phenomenon that Aleks K...
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Science & Medicine
Codes that Changed the World
Aleks Krotoski tells the story of the languages that have been used to talk to machines.
Episodes
5 episodesJava
Aleks Krotoski introduces the programming language that people probably interact with on a daily basis more than any other.
Basic
Basic is the little language that could. As language of choice for home computing in the 1980s, it became iconic.
Cobol
Inefficient, verbose and ugly, yet by the 1990s, 80 per cent of the world's business software was written in Cobol. Aleks Krotoski explores...
Fortran
The history of computing is dominated by the hardware; the race for speed and power has overshadowed how we've devised ways to instruct thes...