Teaching young students or even your own kids to learn or be interested in programming can be really daunting. However, there are free programming languages that are designed to teach children the basic concepts and elements required in traditional programming that you can use to get the job done quite easily.

Curious about programming, but having trouble getting started because you're confused about all those languages? This article will give you an overview of the most common desktop languages you'll see in free software today.

Computerworld Australia recently spoke to Professor Aho to learn more about the development of AWK, in the first of a series of investigations into the most widely used programming languages.

The past couple of years have seen an explosion of open source programming languages and utilities that are geared toward children. Many of these efforts are based around the idea that, since the days of BASIC, programming environments have become far too complex for untrained minds to wrap themselves around.

This time we chat with Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language and regarded as the father of modern scripting languages.

"Which languages make programmers the happiest? It’s clear that some languages are more popular than others, and many of us debate long and hard over the relative merits of Python vs Ruby, C vs Java or Lisp vs everything else. But what’s the general consensus? ..."

Our series on the most popular programming languages continues as we chat to Van Rossum, the man behind Python.

"In his beautiful essay, The Art of Lisp & Writing, Richard Gabriel makes a strong case for the use of programming mediums instead of programming languages when either introducing programming to students or starting a new project. He says..."

Among all the myriad choices that one has to constantly make in life, one would imagine that choosing a programming language for developing an operating system would be a relatively easy one, especially if the OS in question happens to be Linux. Surprisingly, that is not the case at all. Unknown to many, Linux too can be developed using a variety of programming languages.