The TIOBE Community Index which ranks programming languages in terms of their popularity has just had its regular monthly update and the August headline reads "Python going through the roof".

I have to admit that I was unaware of this interesting problem and only discovered it due to a recent review paper. It deserves to be better known as it is a fascinating algorithmic puzzle.

Microsoft has officially launched the .NET Community Toolkit, a collection of helpers and APIs that work for all .NET developers. The toolkit is part of the .NET Foundation and is maintained and published by Microsoft which says the toolkit is agnostic of any specific UI platform.

The talks and tutorials presented at the 4th annual Python Web Conference are now available for free. Topics ranged from Code and Tech to Social and Career advice.

Over the past few weeks Firefox has seen a steeper than usual decline in Monthly Active Users. Now the Canadian Credit Card company MBNA no longer lets its card holders log in to their accounts from Firefox - they are restricted to Chrome, Edge and Safari.

Oracle has announced a new Oracle Service for Microsoft Azure. Using the fully managed service, Azure customers can provision, access, and operate Oracle Database services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with a familiar Azure-like experience.

AI seems to be taking over all the pleasures. You struggle for hours to build that Lego model, but now AI can do the job for you in no time at all and so robs you of all your fun...

This is an extended version of the newsletter emailed to subscribers every Wednesday. As well as listing the week's news items, it also includes the week's Book Review, additions to Book Watch and latest news from the I Programmer Library. Top of the list come the week's two feature articles, one on Kotlin Basics and the other with the intriguing title XOR - The Magic Swap.  

Formula 1 Racing is an aggressive sport and competition can even become vicious. Through reinforcement learning Sony's racing AI, GT Sophy, has evolved a driving style that combines speed with "etiquette" and can outrace top human competitors. This breakthrough has now been recognized with an award.

Wing Python has been updated with improvements including support for containers and clusters, along with a new package management tool.

GitHub has announced the general availability of GitHub Projects powered by GitHub Issues. The developers say GitHub Projects connects your planning directly to the work your teams are doing in GitHub and flexibly adapts to whatever your team needs at any point.

Microsoft has announced that support will be ended for version 3.1 of the .NET Core Framework on December 13, 2022. This is a long- term support (LTS) version, and Microsoft says users should upgrade applications based on .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 6.0 to continue to receive support.

We tend to underestimate how much AI is changing the way we can tackle problems - even problems that seem to have nothing to do with intelligence of any kind. Tinycade converts scrap cardboard into game controllers and it's a new way of thinking.

The State of WebAssembley 2022 report comes from Colin Eberhardt, CTO of UK-based software consultancy Scott Logic. The survey, inaugurated in 2021, has polled hundreds of people to find out more about where and how people are using the technology and gage their thoughts for the future.

Results of the EDB Open Source Talent Survey 2022 indicate that employees value the opportunity to work with and be trained in cutting edge technologies. Security training is also highly prized.

NVIDIA has announced the general availability of NVIDIA AI Enterprise 2.1. The improvements to the AI and data analytics software include new support for containers, and for public clouds.

A new course from the Linux Foundation on edX aims to educate the industry on how to digitally sign software artifacts. Targeted at both software developers and DevOps and security engineers, it focuses on using the Sigstore toolkit to secure the software supply chain. 

RapidAPI has launched RapidAPI Studio, a tool for developers to build, use, manage and make money from developing APIs.