People generally think programming is part of computer science. However, it is a way of thinking.
Coding skills enable software developers to bring a positive impact on our entire society. By learning to program, newbie developers can have a better opportunity to flourish in tomorrow’s competitive world.
Coding can improve a human’s abilities such as cognitive thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. In the near future, every single sector will utilize some sort of software programming.
What are the interesting facts about computer programming?
There are many interesting facts about computer programming that can amaze you. In this article I am listing 30 amazing computer coding/programming facts.
Lets check out these amazing facts:-
#1 Ada Lovelace is said to be the first computer programmer. In 1843, she worked along with Charles Babbage, the inventor of mechanical computers, to build the first computer program for one of his machines—the Analytical Engine.
#2 Margaret Heafield Hamilton is a computer scientist and system engineer who developed an on-board flight application for NASA’s A pollo program.
Image Source: Vox
#3 The JAVA language was previously called Oak. It was named after an oak tree that was grown outside James Gosling’s office (Gosling is best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java coding language). Later, it was renamed Java, from Java coffee (a kind of coffee from Indonesia).
#4 In June 1991, James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton began the Java language project. This programming language was originally created for interactive television, but this language was too modern for the digital cable television sector at that period.
#5 Did you know? There are approximately 700 coding languages.
#6 Grace Hopper and her team created the term from a dead moth they found in Relay 70 of Harvard’s Mark II computer system.
Grace Hopper’s handwritten note after she found a real bug:
Image Credit: Computer History Museum
#7 Did yo know? Fortran (FORmula TRANslation) was the first coding language created by John Backus and his team at IBM in the 1950s.
#8 Computer codes had played a pivotal role in ending World War II. An English computer scientist, Alan Turing, was successful in deciphering Nazis’ code machine ENIGMA with his cryptologic and mathematical skills.
#9 In this Covid-19 pandemic time, Avi Schiffmann, a teenager, developed one of the world’s most popular COVID-19 monitoring websites. He coded ncov2019.live, the admired covid virus tracker that is one of the most visited corona trackers across the globe.
Source: Democracy Now
#10 Kautilya Katariya from UK is the youngest to take up programming at the age of 6. He developed AI applications after completing an array of study materials from IBM. He became a Guinness World Record holder.
#11 Did you know? ADA is a coding language built in 1980 that is used by the International Space Station. In 1995, this programming language was accepted as an international standard programming language.
#12 In 1980, MIT mathematician and a co-founder of the coding language LOGO, Seymour Papert published a book “Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas” in 1980. The book tells, kids can enhance their cognitive thinking skills by learning to code.
Image Source: Goodreads
#13 Bill Gates, Co-founder of Microsoft, created his first computer program- an implementation of tic-tac-toe that enabled users to play games against the computer.
#14 Go is a programming language that was designed at Google in 2007 to enhance coding productivity in the time of multicore, networked machines and large codebases.
#15 During the creation of the Java coding language, Sun Microsystem’s’ Green Project developed its first operational demo, an interactive handheld home entertainment controller known as Star 7. There was a cartoon character named Duke in the touch-screen user interface. It was designed by one of the graphic artists- Joe Palrang. Later he worked on many popular animated movies such as Shrek, Over the Hedge, and many more.
#16 Alan Turing invented the “Turing Test” (one of the Turing tests is CAPTCHA). It is a set of twisted numbers or words on online forms that assist to identify humans from computers. This CAPTCHA was also the contribution of Alan Turing.
#17 Markus Persson, a Swedish software programmer, developed and launched the computer game- Minecraft in 2009. Later the computer game became so popular that Microsoft bought the game for $2.5 billion.
Image Source: IMDb
#18 Steve Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak began their career by building a computer arcade game named “Breakout.”
#19 PHP language was not created to be used worldwide for enterprise applications. Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, built this coding language just to manage his personal web project! But, with time PHP became one of the popular programming languages in the market.
#20 As per Gartner, more than 65% of application development in 2024 will be done by low code programming.
#21 Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management and automation firm, developed 60 apps with low-code programming in 20 months.
#22 When Guido Van Rossum was implementing the Python programming language, along with that he was reading the published scripts from Monty Python’s Flying Circus (a BBC comedy series). He was looking for a name that was concise, unique, and mysterious, so he decided to name the programming language -Python.
#23 Before creating the “C”, one of the most well-known programming languages, there was a predecessor coding language known as the “B”. This “B” language was written by Ken Thompson, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist. Later, Dennis Ritchie created the “C” language by improving the “B” language.
#24 Fred Cohen is known as the inventor of computer virus defense techniques. In 1983, he developed a parasitic application that could ‘infect’ computer systems. He called it a computer virus.
#25 There are multiple meanings of the word “Final” in the Java programming language.
Final Class — A final class cannot be inherited.Final Variable — the value of such variable cannot be modified after it is assigned.Final Method — Method cannot be overridden
#26 Java is both a compiler and an interpreter programming language. The reason being, source code is first compiled into a binary byte-code. After that, byte-code runs on the Java Virtual Machine (a software-based interpreter).
#27 “sizeof” is the only operator which is also a keyword in the C programming language.
#28 JavaScript programming language is called a dynamically typed language because a programmer can create new variables at runtime, and variable type is set at runtime.
#29 Python programming language for Data Science returns more than one value from a single function unlike in the majority of the modern programming languages.
#30 You cannot represent infinity as an integer in any coding language. But with python, you can represent an infinite integer via float values.
Using float(‘inf’) and float(‘-inf’)Wrapping Up
We, the software developers, get tired after working on complex lines of code for endless hours. I hope these cool as well as informative facts about coding have refreshed your mind. After all, a happy mind can deliver better.
Keep enriching your curiosity and master your coding skills to build amazing enterprise applications.
Happy Coding!!
