or should that be Pi-thon 3.14 is out. Even if the digits of Pi aren't burned into your ROM, it's still a big event for Python.

Linus Torvalds seems to have had a bit of a relapse lately in his efforts to moderate his comments on code. One of his latest outbursts merits more than a surface analysis.

Apache Pinot 1.4 has been released with significant improvements to the Multistage Engine, Pauseless Consumption and Time Series Engine among a wide range of other enhancements. Pinot is a real-time distributed OLAP datastore that is purpose-built for low-latency, high-throughput analytics.

Today, October 14th, is Ada Lovelace Day with events around the globe taking place to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and math. Although the date, the second Tuesday in October, isn't related to any events in Ada's life, it is a good time to discover, or revisit, her remarkable story.

Google has updated its Agent Development Kit for Java to add integration with the LangChain4j LLM framework. This expands the range of large language models available to users of the development kit to all those supported by LangChain4j, which opens it up to all the large language models supported by the framework.

PostgreSQL 18 was released on September 25, boosting a
many great features. If you check out the official release statement you'll find that there's a lot to digest, so we'll focus on just a few key features.

The future of programming is in doubt, but this fact has never been in doubt. The future has always been very clear - programming is a transitory phenomenon.

This extended version of the newsletter emailed to subscribers every Wednesday lists the week's news items and additions to Book Watch and the week's two feature articles. This week Mike James asks and answers "What makes Python the super language of the 21st century?" while Ian Elliot has a Programmer's Puzzle based around JavaScript's prototype mechanism. 

The IDEA team has interpreted the quicksort algorithm in a set of illustrations in the style of the IKEA self-assembly furniture instructions. 

Google bug hunters have earned over $430,000 in AI-product related rewards since the original AI Vulnerability Reward Program was launched in October 2023. Now Google has updated the rules to help security researchers focus on the highest-impact (and highest-reward-value) targets.

Apache Daffodil 4 has been released. This is a major upgrade that has moved to depending on Scala 3, Java 17 or newer. The new version also includes a new backwards incompatible validation API.

Selling software to engineering teams has always been a challenge for developer tools companies. Formal sales cycles often lag months behind a developer’s initial, silent adoption of a tool. To address the problem, Reo.Dev captures and interprets overlooked adoption signals with its novel platform.

The TIOBE index for October is out and C has overtaken  to regain the coveted second place in the ranking. What is it about C that makes it so special and can it continue to be as important a language as we enter the era of AI-assisted coding?

Arduino has just been taken over by Qualcomm, a company generally known for its many patent disputes as well as its ARM processors. More importantly, a new Arduino has just been announced that could be a big competitor to Raspberry Pi.

Mozilla has announced that it is adding a new feature to the Firefox desktop browser  - visual search powered by Google Lens. 

The MSSQL Extension for VS Code, Microsoft's open source code editor, has been updated and now has a schema designer, schema compare tool, and local SQL Server containers. 

Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 4.5, describing it as the best coding model in the world. Anthropic says this is the strongest model for building complex agents, the best model at using computers, and it shows substantial gains in reasoning and math.

Google's open source MCP server that allows AI agents to interact with SQL databases.