News

JVM Ecosystem Report Reveals the State of Java   Wednesday 31 October

Java may not make headline news very often, but it is still the language that underpins most of today's commerce and more. The largest survey ever of Java developers, with data  from more than 10,200 respondents, gives an interesting snapshot of the JVM landscape. 

Algojammer - Python Editor in the Style of Bret Victor   Wednesday 31 October

Bret Victor is well known for promoting the idea that programming could be made easier and more natural by providing the right tools and environment. However it isn't easy to create said environment. Algojammer is an ongoing attempt to do just that and it needs your help. 

Google's AI Impact Challenge - $25 Million For Social Good   Tuesday 30 October

At the Google AI For Social Good event, Google.org, issued a call to organizations around the world to submit their ideas for how they could use AI to help address societal challenges. Selected organizations will receive funding from a $25M pool together with support from Google’s AI experts to transform ideas into action. 

Redis Adds Streams Support   Tuesday 30 October

Redis 5 has been released with a new data structure, Streams. This is the first entirely new data structure in Redis for four years,and is a log-like data structure that allows you to store multiple fields and string values with an automatic, time-based sequence at a single key. 

IBM To Acquire Red Hat For $34 Billion   Monday 29 October

Linus Returns A Reformed Character UPDATE  
Monday 29 October

After the Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, where he repeated his determination to behave in a more acceptable manner, Linus Torvalds is back in charge of the Linux kernel. He has already had occasion to try out his new more moderate mode of response while dealing with the 4.19 Merge window.  

Adopt Nybble - OpenCat's First Kitten   Sunday 28 October

A crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo for Nybble, described as the "World's Cutest Open Source Robotic Kitten", has already achieved 95% of its $50,000 goal and there's over 3 weeks left for it to increase its pre-release sales. 

AI-Generated Painting Sells For $432,500 - A Deep Misunderstanding   Saturday 27 October

We all know that the art world is illogical in its approach to the value of things and there are many examples. This time, however, things are a little different. To pay just short of half a million dollars for a painting created by a deep neural network displays a deep misunderstanding. 

Why Take Part In Open Source?   Thursday 25 October

In honor of the 20th anniversary of the open source movement, DigitalOcean dedicated the latest edition of its quarterly developer survey to the state of open source. 

Microsoft Developer Blogs On The Move   Friday 26 October

Microsoft is in the process of moving its developer blogs to a new blogging platform. The aim is to provide "a clean design and powerful features that will make it easy for you to discover and share great content". 

Baidu Makes Breakthrough in Simultaneous Translation   Thursday 25 October

Baidu Research has announced STACL (Simultaneous Translation with Anticipation and Controllable Latency), an automated system that is able to conduct high quality translation concurrently between two languages. 

TypeScript 3.1 Adds Mappable Tuples   Thursday 25 October

TypeScript has been updated to add support for mappable tuple and array types. 

The Core

The Programmers Guide To Kotlin - Anonymous and Lambda Functions   Monday 29 October

Languages that don't allow functions to exist as entities in their own right make things difficult without many advantages. Kotlin introduces features to allow functions to be treated in more flexible ways, in particular to be used as parameters to other functions. 

Babbage's Bag

Cellular Automata - The How and Why   Friday 26 October

You may know about Cellular Automata. If not you may know John Conway's game of Life, but why is this whole subject so important and so interesting? We take a look at not only what a CA is, but why it is so important.