The Appy Awards, presented on 11 April 2011, marked successful and popular applications (generally known as "apps") for mobile devices. Sponsored by The Carphone Warehouse, Europe's largest independent mobile phone retailer, awards were presented in ten categories in a ceremony hosted by television presenters Richard Hammond and Amanda Byram. According to the sponsors, it was "the UK's first major app awards ceremony designed to recognise innovation and development in app technology." The company hoped to make it an annual event.

Carphone Warehouse staff nominated around 1,000 apps from which a panel of judges produced a shortlist of 50, announced by Hammond in February 2011. In an online process, about 30,000 votes were cast by the public to choose the winners. Most of the shortlisted apps are free to download but others require a one-off or an ongoing payment. Finland-based Rovio Mobile's 2009 game Angry Birds, which recently passed the 100-million download mark, won the award for Best App of the Year along with a win in the Best Game App category and a nomination in the Best Time Waster App category. Lima Sky's Doodle Jump, which topped 10 million downloads in March 2011, was nominated in both the Best Game App and Best Time Waster App categories but failed to win either. Similarly ShopSavvy Barcode Scanner and Football Manager Handheld 2011 were nominated in two categories, both failing to win an award. As of 2016, no further Appy Awards have been made other than those in the inaugural ceremony. (Full article...)

Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation.

Python is dynamically typed and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including structured (particularly procedural), object-oriented and functional programming. It is often described as a "batteries included" language due to its comprehensive standard library.

Guido van Rossum began working on Python in the late 1980s as a successor to the ABC programming language and first released it in 1991 as Python 0.9.0. Python 2.0 was released in 2000. Python 3.0, released in 2008, was a major revision not completely backward-compatible with earlier versions. Python 2.7.18, released in 2020, was the last release of Python 2. (Full article...)

Margaret Elaine Hamilton (née Heafield; born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She invented the term "software engineering", stating "I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process."

On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions. (Full article...)

Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, and object-oriented high-level programming language, inspired by Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for design by contract (DbC), extremely strong typing, explicit concurrency, tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors. Ada is an international technical standard, jointly defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). , the standard, called Ada 2022 informally, is ISO/IEC 8652:2023.

Ada was originally designed by a team led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah of Honeywell under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede over 450 programming languages used by the DoD at that time. Ada was named after Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who has been credited as the first computer programmer. (Full article...)

Erlang (/ˈɜːrlæŋ/ UR-lang) is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional high-level programming language, and a garbage-collected runtime system. The term Erlang is used interchangeably with Erlang/OTP, or Open Telecom Platform (OTP), which consists of the Erlang runtime system, several ready-to-use components (OTP) mainly written in Erlang, and a set of design principles for Erlang programs.

The Erlang runtime system is designed for systems with these traits:

• Distributed
• Fault-tolerant
• Soft real-time
• Highly available, non-stop applications
• Hot swapping, where code can be changed without stopping a system.

(Full article...)

Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, film producer, and philanthropist. He is best known for co-founding Microsoft Corporation with his childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which helped spark the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Allen was ranked as the 44th-wealthiest person in the world by Forbes in 2018, with an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion at the time of his death.

Allen quit from day-to-day work at Microsoft in early 1983 after a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, remaining on its board as vice-chairman. He and his sister, Jody Allen, founded Vulcan Inc. in 1986, a privately held company that managed his business and philanthropic efforts. He had a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio, including technology and media companies, scientific research, real estate holdings, private space flight ventures, and stakes in other sectors. He owned the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association, and was part-owner of the Seattle Sounders FC of Major League Soccer. Under the helm of Allen, the Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII and made it to two other Super Bowls (XL and XLIX). In 2000 he resigned from his position on Microsoft's board and assumed the post of senior strategy advisor to the company's management team.

Allen founded the Allen Institutes for Brain Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Cell Science, as well as companies like Stratolaunch Systems and Apex Learning. He gave more than $2 billion to causes such as education, wildlife and environmental conservation, the arts, healthcare, and community services. In 2004, he funded the first crewed private spaceplane with SpaceShipOne. He received numerous awards and honors, and was listed among the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2007 and 2008. (Full article...)

In the C++ programming language, decltype is a keyword used to query the type of an expression. Introduced in C++11, its primary intended use is in generic programming, where it is often difficult, or even impossible, to express types that depend on template parameters.

As generic programming techniques became increasingly popular throughout the 1990s, the need for a type-deduction mechanism was recognized. Many compiler vendors implemented their own versions of the operator, typically called typeof, and some portable implementations with limited functionality, based on existing language features were developed. In 2002, Bjarne Stroustrup proposed that a standardized version of the operator be added to the C++ language, and suggested the name "decltype", to reflect that the operator would yield the "declared type" of an expression.

decltype's semantics were designed to cater to both generic library writers and novice programmers. In general, the deduced type matches the type of the object or function exactly as declared in the source code. Like the sizeof operator, decltype's operand is not evaluated. (Full article...)

A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. It is one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components.

A computer program in its human-readable form is called source code. Source code needs another computer program to execute because computers can only execute their native machine instructions. Therefore, source code may be translated to machine instructions using the language's compiler. (Assembly language programs are translated using an assembler.) The resulting file is called an executable. Alternatively, source code may execute within the language's interpreter.

If the executable is requested for execution, then the operating system loads it into memory and starts a process. The central processing unit will soon switch to this process so it can fetch, decode, and then execute each machine instruction. (Full article...)

Scala (/ˈskɑːlə/ SKAH-lah) is a strong statically typed high-level general-purpose programming language that supports both object-oriented programming and functional programming. Designed to be concise, many of Scala's design decisions are intended to address criticisms of Java.

Scala source code can be compiled to Java bytecode and run on a Java virtual machine (JVM). Scala can also be compiled to JavaScript to run in a browser, or directly to a native executable. On the JVM Scala provides language interoperability with Java so that libraries written in either language may be referenced directly in Scala or Java code. Like Java, Scala is object-oriented, and uses a syntax termed curly-brace which is similar to the language C. Since Scala 3, there is also an option to use the off-side rule (indenting) to structure blocks, and its use is advised. Martin Odersky has said that this turned out to be the most productive change introduced in Scala 3.

Unlike Java, Scala has many features of functional programming languages (like Scheme, Standard ML, and Haskell), including currying, immutability, lazy evaluation, and pattern matching. It also has an advanced type system supporting algebraic data types, covariance and contravariance, higher-order types (but not higher-rank types), anonymous types, operator overloading, optional parameters, named parameters, raw strings, and an experimental exception-only version of algebraic effects that can be seen as a more powerful version of Java's checked exceptions. (Full article...)

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm (/ˈælɡərɪðəm/ ^ⓘ) is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing calculations and data processing. More advanced algorithms can use conditionals to divert the code execution through various routes (referred to as automated decision-making) and deduce valid inferences (referred to as automated reasoning), achieving automation eventually. Using human characteristics as descriptors of machines in metaphorical ways was already practiced by Alan Turing with terms such as "memory", "search" and "stimulus".

In contrast, a heuristic is an approach to problem solving that may not be fully specified or may not guarantee correct or optimal results, especially in problem domains where there is no well-defined correct or optimal result. For example, social media recommender systems rely on heuristics in such a way that, although widely characterized as "algorithms" in 21st century popular media, cannot deliver correct results due to the nature of the problem.

As an effective method, an algorithm can be expressed within a finite amount of space and time and in a well-defined formal language for calculating a function. Starting from an initial state and initial input (perhaps empty), the instructions describe a computation that, when executed, proceeds through a finite number of well-defined successive states, eventually producing "output" and terminating at a final ending state. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as randomized algorithms, incorporate random input. (Full article...)

The analytical engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, which was a design for a simpler mechanical calculator.

The analytical engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. In other words, the structure of the analytical engine was essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in the electronic era. The analytical engine is one of the most successful achievements of Charles Babbage.

Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding. It was not until 1941 that Konrad Zuse built the first general-purpose computer, Z3, more than a century after Babbage had proposed the pioneering analytical engine in 1837. (Full article...)

Fortran (/ˈfɔːrtræn/; formerly FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.

Fortran was originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, and subsequently came to dominate scientific computing. It has been in use for over seven decades in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry. It is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

Fortran's design was the basis for many other programming languages, especially BASIC and ALGOL. But Fortran has itself evolved through numerous versions and dialects, adding extensions while largely retaining compatibility with preceding versions. Successive versions have added support for structured programming and processing of character-based data (FORTRAN 77), array programming, modular programming and generic programming (Fortran 90), High Performance Fortran (Fortran 95), object-oriented programming (Fortran 2003), concurrent programming (Fortran 2008), and native parallel computing capabilities (Coarray Fortran 2008/2018). (Full article...)

The history of computing in the Soviet Union began in the late 1940s, when the country began to develop its Small Electronic Calculating Machine (MESM) at the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology in Feofaniya. Initial ideological opposition to cybernetics in the Soviet Union was overcome by a Khrushchev era policy that encouraged computer production.

By the early 1970s, the uncoordinated work of competing government ministries had left the Soviet computer industry in disarray. Due to lack of common standards for peripherals and lack of digital storage capacity the Soviet Union's technology significantly lagged behind the West's semiconductor industry. The Soviet government decided to abandon development of original computer designs and encouraged cloning of existing Western systems (e.g. the 1801 CPU series was scrapped in favor of the PDP-11 ISA by the early 1980s).

Soviet industry was unable to mass-produce computers to acceptable quality standards and locally manufactured copies of Western hardware were unreliable. As personal computers spread to industries and offices in the West, the Soviet Union's technological lag increased. (Full article...)

Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation. Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its current best-selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system; Microsoft Office, a suite of productivity software; Xbox, a line of entertainment of games, music, and video; Bing, a line of search engines; and Microsoft Azure, a cloud services platform.

In 1980, Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM to bundle Microsoft's operating system with IBM computers; with that deal, IBM paid Microsoft a royalty for every sale. In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2. Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2. Microsoft Windows eventually overshadowed OS/2 in terms of sales. When Microsoft launched several versions of Microsoft Windows in the 1990s, they had captured over 90% market share of the world's personal computers.

As of June 30, 2015, Microsoft has a global annual revenue of US$86.83 (~$105 billion in 2022) Billion and 128,076 employees worldwide. It develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. (Full article...)

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.

Ada Byron was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and reformer Lady Byron. All Lovelace's half-siblings, Lord Byron's other children, were born out of wedlock to other women. Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever. He died in Greece when Ada was eight. Her mother was anxious about her upbringing and promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing her father's perceived insanity. Despite this, Ada remained interested in him, naming her two sons Byron and Gordon. Upon her death, she was buried next to him at her request. Although often ill in her childhood, Ada pursued her studies assiduously. She married William King in 1835. King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, Ada thereby becoming Countess of Lovelace.

Her educational and social exploits brought her into contact with scientists such as Andrew Crosse, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday, and the author Charles Dickens, contacts which she used to further her education. Ada described her approach as "poetical science" and herself as an "Analyst (& Metaphysician)". (Full article...)