News

Visualizing the Gender Gap in Computer Science   Wednesday 18 December

Women earned only 18% of Computer Science degrees in 2012, down from 27% in 2001, and this gender imbalance needs to be rectified in order to meet the looming skills gap in the software industry.

Microsoft Moves To Roslyn   Wednesday 18 December

The Microsoft Languages team is now using the “Roslyn” edition of the VB and C# compilers for daily work. When can we expect to see this cloud compiler for ourselves?

Vim.js   Tuesday 17 December

This is not the time to get into editor wars - Vim is now available in browser. Yes, a JavaScript port of Vim exists.

Binary - Older Than You Think   Tuesday 17 December

Binary is the number system of the computer age, so it is a big surprise to learn that it's more than 600 years old and was used by Polynesians as part of their counting system. 

Hour of Code Reaches Over 16 Million - What Next?   Monday 16 December

Computer Science Education Week is over and the statistics are impressive. Students are claimed to have written 537,083,202 lines of code and over a million people have signed up to support the idea that "every child in school should be given the opportunity to learn to program".

Mozilla Developer Network Redesign   Monday 16 December

There’s a new front-end for the Mozilla Developer Network that should be easier to use.

Holiday Game Creator Challenge   Monday 16 December

Mozilla is partnering with Goo Technologies in a competition for creating games or game scenes using Goo Create and or Goo Engine that run on Firefox 26.

Software Stops Quadcopters Falling   Sunday 15 December

The rise of the quadcopter drone seems unstopable even if no one has found a sensible practical use for them - but what about safety. Does the future hold the prospect of drones falling from the sky onto the heads of unsuspecting people?

Google Adds Boston Dynamics To Its Robotics Acquisitions   Saturday 14 December

Until now  Google's interest in robotics has been focused on driverless cars. Over the past six months it has been diversifying and has already acquired seven, mostly low-profile, robotics companies. With Boston Dynamics it has added one of the best known

Build 2014 Will Happen April 2 - 4   Friday 13 December

Early today Microsoft posted the dates and venue for Build 2014 on its website and then quickly withdrew them with a spokesperson saying that Microsoft "isn't commenting at this time regarding future //build dates." Now the dates are back and April 2-4 in San Francisco is confirmed.

Google's Dart Becomes ECMA's Dart   Friday 13 December

Google's Dart just reached version 1.0, but now it seems that it has aspirations to being an international standard.  The question is will this make any difference to the language's future?

Neo4j 2.0 A Dream Graph Database   Friday 13 December

A new version of Neo4j is available and is being described by the creators as the graph database they dreamed about, providing graphs for everyone, and with a new tool for developers.

Google's LiquidFun For Fluid Simulation   Thursday 12 December

Google has announced the open source release of LiquidFun, a2D physics engine that can be used on any platform with a C++ compiler, including Android, Linux, OSX and Windows.

Twitter Is Best Tech Place To Work   Thursday 12 December

Glassdoor has published the results of its sixth annual Employees’ Choice Awards and this year Twitter has replaced Facebook as Top Tech Company.

Professional Programmer

Deep Teaching   Thursday 12 December

The end of Computer Science Education week and the Hour of Code is a good time to consider what teaching programming and computer science is really all about. It is time we turned from shallow teaching to deep teaching.

Babbage's Bag

The Magic Number Seven And The Art Of Programming   Tuesday 17 December

The number seven is very important in programming and many other intellectual endeavors. Why is is magic and what significance does it have for us poor limited humans?