News

Can a Language Make You a Better Programmer? Kotlin & Android   Wednesday 08 August

When Google introduced Kotlin as a fully supported language for Android development, a lot of programmers raised a cheer. The question is why? Can a language make a difference?

OpenAI Five Dota 2 Bots Beat Top Human Players   Wednesday 08 August

A team comprising five artificial intelligence agents that had learned to play Dota 2 from scratch simply by exploring and experimenting, has convincingly beaten a team of five human player, four of whom are top ranked Dota 2 professionals. 

New ACM Breakthrough In Computing Award  
Tuesday 07 August

The Association for Computing Machinery has created a new major award for a surprising or disruptive leapfrog in computing ideas or technologies. Named to honor “Chuck” Thacker it carries a prize of $100,000 and is intended to be biennial. 

Kafka 2 Adds Support For ACLs   Tuesday 07 August

There's a new version of Apache Kafka with new features to improve authentication, security, and replication. Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that can be used for building real-time streaming data pipelines between systems or applications. 

Artificial Intelligence for Trading Nanodegree  
Monday 06 August

In partnership with WorldQuant, Udacity has a new Artificial Intelligence for Trading Nanodegree program. Applications are now open for the first cohort which begins on August 21st. 

PyCharm Now Supports Pipenv   Monday 06 August

There's an update to PyCharm which includes support for Pipenv environments, and has better pytest support. 

Would You Turn Off A Robot That Was Afraid Of The Dark?   Sunday 05 August

A new experiment designed to explore whether people respond to robots as if they were sentient has demonstrated that people will refuse to turn a robot off if it begs them not to. 

Apple Kills App Store Affiliate Program   Saturday 04 August

It is a tough life trying to make a dollar on the modern web - advertising doesn't pay and now Apple has pulled the rug out from under some of its most supportive web sites. By killing its affiliate program, it may well have killed independent technical journalism aimed at Apple. 

Python Tops Language Ranking Again   Friday 03 August

The IEEE Spectrum ranking of the top programming languages has been published and, unsurprisingly, Python is at the top of the list for the second year in a row. The big surprise is that Assembly has entered the Top 10 in the default ranking, that is tuned to the interests of a typical IEEE member. 

Kafka Graphs Framework Extends Kafka Streams   Friday 03 August

A new graph processing framework for Apache Kafka extends Kafka Streams to provide distributed graph analytics based only on what is already provided by the Kafka layers. Kafka Graphs is a client layer for distributed processing of graphs. 

Ivy League Online Master's In Computer Science on Coursera   Thursday 02 August

Coursera has added another option for pursuing a postgraduate degree in Computer Science to its platform. The University of Pennsylvania Online Master of Computer and Information Technology has  no computer science prerequisites so enabling people with diverse academic backgrounds to switch to a CS-related career.  

AWS Greengrass Now Supports C Executables   Thursday 02 August

An updated version of AWS Greengrass has been released with added support for deploying executables written in C, C++ and in any other language that supports importing of C libraries. 

The Core

Programmer's Python - Single Inheritance  
Monday 06 August

Python supports multiple inheritance which can be scary, but before you master it you have to know how single inheritance works - no less scary! This extract is from the new book by Mike James with the subtitle "Something Completely Different". 

Babbage's Bag

How Memory Works  
Friday 03 August

Exactly how does computer memory work? What is surprising is that  it still works in more or less the same way as when Babbage designed his Analytical Engine or the IBM 360 accessed core memory. So where do all our programs live?