News

AlphaFold DeepMind's Protein Structure Breakthrough   Wednesday 12 December

AlphaGo learned to play Go at grand-master level. AlphaFold has used similar methods to learn to predict protein folding and this is far more important. 

What Programming Languages Should Students Learn   Wednesday 12 December

A new survey by HackerRank shows a worrying divide between the programming languages students are taught and those in demand by employers. 

MS Cryptography Library Open Sourced  
Tuesday 11 December

The Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (Microsoft SEAL) homomorphic encryption library has been made is open source on GitHub under an MIT License for free use. The library was developed by researchers in the Cryptography Research group at Microsoft. 

Programmer Gifts 10 - Pi For Xmas  
Monday 10 December

The holiday season is a good time to learn about computers - you have the time. But where to start? Our advice is to ignore the pudding and go for a Pi. 

Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos 50 years On  
Monday 10 December

It is 50 years since Douglas Engelbart presented a talk that came to be known as the  "Mother of All Demos".  The landmark event introduced many aspects of interactive computing, including the mouse. These ideas, now commonplace, were visionary in 1968 and must have stunned many in the audience. 

Nvidia Open Sources Physics Engine  
Monday 10 December

Nvidia has released a new version of its physics engine, PhysX, and has made it open source. The developers say the engine has been upgraded to provide industrial grade simulation quality at game simulation performance. 

Grace Hopper's 112th Birthday  
Saturday 08 December

Today, December 9th 2018, is the 112th anniversary of the birth of Grace Hopper. Her continuing legacy has been to inspire efforts to enhance the career interests of women in computing. Her concern for teaching young people is why Computer Science Education Week and the Hour of Code are timed to coincide with her birthday. 

Programmer Gifts 01 - Trust Me I'm A Programmer   Saturday 08 December

Programmer gifts - easy idea, difficult implementation. Try these out and you can trust me - I'm a programmer. No, really I am. 

Rust Survey Revelations  
Friday 07 December

The 2018 Rust Survey attracted more responses than in previous years and a greater proportion of respondents were active users of the language.  

Microsoft To Go Chromium Update: Confirmed  
Friday 07 December

When we covered the news that Microsoft was giving up on its own browser, Edge, and moving instead to use Chromium last week, it had the status of a rumor. Now Microsoft has confirmed that it is all true and there are some extra surprises - it's a Win32 app for one! 

The Future Is Flutter...  
Thursday 06 December

Is Google's Flutter just another attempt to rescue a failed language - Dart - or is it the future of mobile development? It really is too early to say, but with the release of Flutter 1.0 the balance seems to be moving to the future view.

Visual Studio 2019 Preview Integrates Live Share  
Thursday 06 December

The first preview of the next major version of Visual Studio has been released and shown off at Connect(), Microsoft's developer conference. 

The Core

Programmer's Python - Inside Class  
Monday 10 December

In a previous extract from the book by Mike James with the subtitle "Something Completely Different", we looked at how Python provides the basic facilities needed to implement what looks like a classical approach to objects – that is class and methods. In this chapter we look more closely at how this works. It is slightly more complicated than you might imagine.

History

Grace Hopper - The Mother of Cobol  
Thursday 06 December

Rear Admiral Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was responsible not only for the development of the Cobol language but also for the continuous pressure within the industry to make computers and computing more accessible and to to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.