Programmer Puzzles

JavaScript Puzzle - The Too Tidy Assignment   Friday 22 February

There is a rule about not optimizing code too soon. Perhaps we should add to that the rule that being too tidy is often a mistake. Here we have a JavaScript example where things go wrong because of an attempt to keep the code compact and understandable.

News

CoffeeScript Supports Literate Programming   Wednesday 27 February

The latest release of CoffeeScript has a new ‘literate’ mode to make it easier to develop Markdown documents that are executable.

Zuckerberg, Gates And More Promoting Computing In Schools   Wednesday 27 February

Code.org is a new non-profit foundation committed to the idea that "Every student in school should have the opportunity to learn to code", a message endorsed by some powerful role models.

Who Is Building WebKit?   Wednesday 27 February

Now that Opera have decided to use WebKit there are now only three important HTML rendering engines - Mozilla's Gecko, Microsoft's Trident and WebKit - and only Gecko and WebKit are open source. This makes it very important that we know who is influencing the future of WebKit.

Ruby 2.0.0 Emphasizes Lazy   Tuesday 26 February

A new stable version of Ruby has been released. Ruby 2.0.0 adds keyword arguments, new ways to extend classes, and extras in the built-in libraries.  

Agile As Family Therapy   Tuesday 26 February

It used to be physicists who poked their noises into other people's subjects, but now it could be programmers. Agile programming is very popular, but currently not as a way to manage your family - this could be about to change.

Chrome Gets Desktop App Launcher   Monday 25 February

Chrome - both the browser and the OS - has been in the news recently. Chrome 25 is the latest version of the browser and there is a big new expensive Chromebook. A more exciting development is the introduction of the app launcher into the developer channel. At last HTML apps run on the desktop.

DevWeek 2013 - One Week To Go   Monday 25 February

With just one week to go until the developer conference that will take over the Barbican Centre in London, we try to pick some interesting sessions.

JDK 8 To Be Rescheduled?   Monday 25 February

The schedule for the next Java Development Kit is uncertain in view of missing features in the latest milestone release.

MOOCs - A Critique   Sunday 24 February

Massive Online Open Courses - are they a good thing or are they potentially harmful? It depends on which side of the fence you are standing.

New Imagine Cup Competitions With a Focus on Women   Sunday 24 February

Walking With Robots - The Robot App Store   Sunday 24 February

Walk with me, NAO is the latest addition to the Robot App Store and this video shows how a human can guide the robot simply by holding its hand.

Most Businesses Moving To Big Data   Saturday 23 February

More than 75 per cent of midsize to large businesses plan to implement big data projects within the coming year, according to new research from Microsoft.

Juggling Quadrotors   Saturday 23 February

It is difficult to know what sort of breakthrough this might be, but it is an amazing video. Two quadrotors balance a pole, an inverted pendulum and then play toss and catch.

Xamarin iOS Development in Visual Studio   Friday 22 February

Xamarin 2.0 includes a plug-in that iOS devs can use to write native C# apps using Microsoft Visual Studio. It also introduces the Xamarin Studio IDE and a collection of components.

JavaScript Assembly Language   Friday 22 February

The idea of using JavaScript as a modern day assembly language for browser code is being taken very seriously by Mozilla. Asm.js is a specification for a high performance JavaScript assembly language and OdinMonkey is an engine that runs it really fast.

NetBeans IDE 7.3 Released   Friday 22 February

With the release by Oracle of NetBeans 7.3, Project Easel has come to fruition. There is a now support for HTML5, CSS and JavaScript within the framework widely used by Java developers.

Computational Photography On A Chip   Thursday 21 February

Computational photography is a growing field and it is even mature enough for some of its approaches and algorithms to have found their way into silicon. MIT has a new low power chip that could revolutionize photography.

ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012 Update   Thursday 21 February

Microsoft has released an update for ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012. The update adds features to ASP.NET and Visual Studio. The update will be included as part of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, and is also available for download.

Codeacademy Adds New API Courses   Thursday 21 February

Codeacademy has expanded its API curriculum with several further sets of lessons. It now covers 22 APIs and the SkyDrive API is billed as coming soon.

The Core

A Generic SQL Server Compression Utility   Tuesday 26 February

We are familair with the idea of compressing images to reduce the storage space required and make them faster to display. Here compression is applied to database tables and indexes to improve query performance.

History

John Backus - the Father of Fortran   Wednesday 27 February

Creating the first compiler went hand-in-hand with the task to creating the first high-level computer language. You can argue that this was Fortran or some other language but the fact of the matter is that Fortran was the language that kickstarted the wide spread use of computers. This is the story of how it happened.