Programming News and Views
Send your programming press releases, news items or comments to: NewsDesk@i-programmer.info
Take Part In GitHub's Copilot Adventures 17 Jul | Nikos Vaggalis ![]() GitHub Copilot Adventures is a repository that, through fun and educational play, teaches how to use Copilot effectively. |
Google Firebase Studio Adds AI Features 17 Jul | Kay Ewbank ![]() Google has updated Firebase Studio with new Agent modes, foundational support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Gemini CLI integration. |
AI Leads To Slowdown In Developer Productivity 16 Jul | Sue Gee Empirical research into whether access to AI-powered tools, primarily Cursor, reduces or lengthens the time taken to deal with routine software development tasks produced an unexpected result. Using AI tools increased task-completion time by 19%. |
TIOBE - Two To Rule Them All 16 Jul | Mike James ![]() The July Tiobe index is out and it isn't particularly interesting until you notice that it confirms the standard model of programming - code is written in Python and C and everything else is just noise. |
Understanding AWS Plans For New Subscribers 15 Jul | Sue Gee ![]() Amazon has made major changes to AWS accounts that came into effect today. If you are new to AWS do the benefits of signing up to a Free plan outweigh the disadvantages and risks? |
Codacy Guardrails For Secure AI-Generated Code 15 Jul | Kay Ewbank ![]() Codacy has released Guardrails, a new solution for securing AI-generated code directly in the IDE to prevent vulnerabilities in code completions from reaching Git. |
Geany 2.1 Improves UI 14 Jul | Alex Denham ![]() Geany, the lightweight IDE, has been updated to add new themes and support for more file types and platform-native file selection dialogs. |
Akka Launches Agentic Platform 14 Jul | Kay Ewbank ![]() Akka has launched a new Akka Agentic Platform that can be used to build, operate, and evaluate any type of agentic AI system. The platform provides orchestration, memory, toolkits for agents, and streaming capabilities. |
AI-Powered Wearable Can Monitor Knee Joint Torque 13 Jul | Harry Fairhead Knee-related conditions such as osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis significantly impact mobility and also increase susceptibility to injuries, creating a cycle that leads to chronic pain, reduced function, and long-term disability. Now researchers have come up with an AI-powered wearable to analyse complex dynamic motion signals of the knee joint for accurate torque monitoring. |
July Week 1 12 Jul | Editor ![]() This extended version of the newsletter emailed to subscribers every Wednesday lists the week's news items, Book Review and additions to Book Watch and the week's two feature articles. This week Mike James explains how to use masks to work with bit patterns in Python and we look at the fascinating story behind the spreadsheet and how Mitch Kapor founded Lotus Development Corporation. |
Fei-Fei Li On Spatial Intelligence As The Next Frontier In AI 11 Jul | Sue Gee Last month in front of an enthusiastic audience at Y Combinator, Fei-Fei Li, often called the godmother of AI, talked to Diana Hu about spatial intelligence and why she considers it the next critical step for AI and essential for achieving Artificial General Intelligence. |
MCP Developers Summit - The Talks 11 Jul | Nikos Vaggalis ![]() MCP has taken the industry by storm just one year after its appearance. And now we have an MCP Summit, run by the trend setters themselves! |
GNU Nano 8.5 Enhances Anchor Positions 10 Jul | Alex Denham ![]() GNU Nano 8.5 has been released with improved text anchors and fine-tuned syntax coloring. GNU nano is a command line text editor for Unix and Linux that aims to be simple and easy to use. |
Gemini On-Device - Generative AI For Robots 09 Jul | Sue Gee In that same way Gemini can produce text, write poetry, summarize an article, write code, and generate images, it can also generate robot actions with Gemini Robotics. Now, the new Gemini Robotics On-Device model eliminates the need for a network connection, and its full SDK allows roboticists to train robots with new tasks. |
Perl 5.42 Released - Still Going Strong 09 Jul | Nikos Vaggalis ![]() Just hot out of the oven, there's a new minor version release of the venerable programming language that is Perl. |
Google Introduces Gemini CLI Open-Source Agent 08 Jul | Kay Ewbank ![]() Google is introducing Gemini CLI, an open-source AI agent that offers lightweight access to Gemini, Google's conversational chatbot that is based on Google's multimodal large language model (LLM), also called Gemini, from terminals. |
Windows 11 Overtakes Windows 10 - But Not In Europe 08 Jul | Sue Gee With the end of support of Windows 10 just three months away, Windows 11 has finally edged ahead of Windows 10 in terms of Desktop Windows Version Market Share on a Worldwide Basis. In Europe, however, Windows 10 still stays firmly ahead. |
Apache Arrow 21 Released 07 Jul | Kay Ewbank ![]() Version 21 of Apache Arrow has been released, including the first official Swift implementation of the platform. Improvements to Arrow 21 include exposing gRPC in the Flight client builder and improvements to Avro read consumers. The Swift implementation has been under development for a couple of years now. |
Other Articles
|
Book Review
15 Jul
Author: Joel Murach This is an updated edition of a longstanding popular title. The new edition adds a chapter on cloud computing and hosting MySQL on Amazon Web Services, and updates the information for MySQL 8.0.33, removing deprecated data types and functions and adding new statement options and clauses. |
Featured Articles
Raspberry Pi 5 IoT In C - I2C with Gpio5 16 Jul | Harry Fairhead ![]() The Gpio5 library is a replacement specifically for the Raspberry Pi 5 and CM5 for direct access libraries such as Wiring Pi, bcm2835, pigpio, etc and it provides direct access to the GPIO lines, SPI, PWM and I2C. This is an extract from the Raspberry Pi 5 IoT In C: Drivers and Gpoi5 on how to use it with I2C. |
Jay Forrester and Whirlwind 14 Jul | Historian Today we celebrate the 107th birthday of Jay Forrester. Discover the man who invented core memory and, indirectly, gave the Core section of IProgrammer its name. |
Programmer's Python Data - Bit Masks 07 Jul | Mike James ![]() To work with bit patterns you have to master the mask. Find out what lies behind in this extract from Programmer's Python: Everything is Data. |
Mitch Kapor and Lotus 1-2-3 04 Jul | Historian The spreadsheet was a remarkable invention and yet the people who pioneered it didn't reap all the rewards they should have. Today we take spreadsheets for granted, but there is fascinating story lurking behind the scenes. |
The Trick Of The Mind - Regular Little Language 01 Jul | Mike James ![]() Regular expressions are another example of a little language - expressive yes but not Turing complete. This is an extract from my book Trick of the Mind which explores what it is to be a programmer. |
Unhandled Exception!
|
Book Watch
Follow Book Watch on Twitter
Book Watch is I Programmer's listing of new books and is compiled using publishers' publicity material. It is not to be read as a review where we provide an independent assessment. Some but by no means all of the books in Book Watch are eventually reviewed.
16 Jul This book covers the essentials of modern Fortran, and is written for all ages and all skill levels. Mike McGrath starts from setting up your coding environment and starting to write Fortran programs with the Fortran programming language and the modern Intel IFX Fortran compiler. Color-coded examples illustrate the text, and all source code is available to download. |
14 Jul This book offers a targeted approach to address the memory constraints presented when programming in C++ in allocating and managing memory efficiently given the diverse needs of real-time systems, embedded systems, games, and conventional desktop applications. Written by an ISO C++ Standards Committee member, Patrice Roy, this guide covers fundamental concepts of object lifetime and memory organization. Readers will learn how to control memory allocation mechanisms, create custom containers and allocators, and adapt allocation operators to suit specific requirements. |
11 Jul Subtitled "Understanding the Powerful Analytics that Fuel AI, Make or Break Careers, and Could Just End Up Saving the World", in this book Justin Evans shows how data is not about number crunching. It's about ideas, and that AI is just an accelerated way to put data to work. Each chapter illustrates one of the core principles of solving problems with data by featuring an expert who has solved a big problem with data, from the entrepreneur creating a “loneliness score” to the epidemiologist trying to save lives by finding disease “hotspots.” |
More Book Watch
|
Previous Book Watch.
Follow Book Watch on Twitter.
Publishers send your book news to:
bookwatch@i-programmer.info