Communications of the ACM
50 Years of Pascal
The Pascal programming language creator Niklaus Wirth reflects on its origin, spread, and further development.
From ACM Opinion
The U.S. Needs a High-Tech Manhattan Project
The United States needs to wrest the high-tech initiative from China and re-establish American dominance in telecommunications, computation, artificial intelligence...
From ACM Opinion
Why We Can't Develop Voting Software That Works
Ever wonder why we could write software to get to the Moon, but not to count votes? Here are five reasons.
From ACM Opinion
Challenging the Myth of the 10x Programmer
A pervasive belief in software engineering is that some programmers are much better than others, and that their skills, abilities, and talents exert an outsized...
From Communications of the ACM
Numbers Are for Computers, Strings Are for Humans
How and where software should translate data into a human-readable form.
From ACM Opinion
We're Banning Facial Recognition. We're Missing the Point.
The whole point of modern surveillance is to treat people differently, and facial recognition technologies are only a small part of that.
From ACM Opinion
We're Approaching the Limits of Computer Power – We Need New Programmers Now
Ever-faster processors led to bloated software, but physical limits may force a return to the concise code of the past.
From Communications of the ACM
A* Search: What's in a Name?
A search for algorithmic answers returns unique results.
From Communications of the ACM
Uncertainty
Considering how to best navigate stability and randomness.
From Communications of the ACM
Algorithms, Platforms, and Ethnic Bias
How computing platforms and algorithms can potentially either reinforce or identify and address ethnic biases.
From Communications of the ACM
How Might We Increase System Trustworthiness?
Summarizing some of the changes that seem increasingly necessary to address known system and network deficiencies and anticipate currently unknown vulnerabilities...
From Communications of the ACM
The Cloud as an Innovation Platform for Software Development
How cloud computing became a platform.
From ACM Opinion
Hackers Needed To Defeat Hackers
In an online world infested with hackers, we need more hackers.
From ACM Opinion
Wouldn't It Be Great If People Could Vote on the Blockchain?
Mobile voting could increase voter participation, but it's plagued by security issues in search of a solution.
From ACM Opinion
Why Tech Will Never Be Able to Predict the Next Mass Shooting
Following the horrific mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton last weekend, President Trump called on social media companies to develop tools that could help identify...
From Communications of the ACM
Block-based Programming in Computer Science Education
Considering how block-based programming environments and tools might be used at the introductory level and beyond.
From ACM Opinion
Love It or Hate It, Java Continues to Evolve
A recent article about languages that developers love and those that they hate reported that Java was the third most loved language as well as the second most hated...
From ACM Opinion
Software Below the Poverty Line
The majority of open-source projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold...
From ACM Opinion