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.

Invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system 50 ...

The Java programming language emerged roughly 25 years ago, when Smalltalk and C++ dominated. Back then it was easy to argue that the world didn't need another object-oriented programming language.