April Week 3
Written by Editor   
Saturday, 20 April 2019

Week-by-week I Programmer has new articles and book reviews, written by programmers, for programmers. We also cover breaking news stories and recently published books. In this week's articles Mike James muses about Scientists, Data Scientists And Significance and Harry Fairhead asks Is This What It Now Means To Build A Computer?   

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April 11 - 17, 2019 

Professional Programmer

Scientists, Data Scientists And Significance
 Monday 15 April

powerIn a recent special issue of The American Statistician,  scientists are urged to stop using the term "statistically significant". So what should we be using? Is this just ignorance triumphing over good practice? 

Is This What It Now Means To Build A Computer?   Thursday 11 April

kano2When I was young, building a computer was taken to mean soldering chips into place and low-level debugging. Now it seems to mean putting a prebuilt computer into a box. 

Book Review of the Week 

  • Access 2019 Bible


    Kay Ewbank awarded a rating of 4.7 to the updated version of a classic title noting that while it isn't specifically aimed at developers, it does have 300 pages on programming with Access. 

New Listings in Book Watch 

 

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News

Google Attempts To Fix AMP - Makes It Worse  
Wednesday 17 April

amp3AMP is Google's attempt to speed up the web or to dominate it even more than it does at the moment - take your pick of these alternatives. In an attempt to address one of the biggest criticisms of AMP, Google has invented Signed Exchanges. A fix to a problem we didn't really need to have. 

Open Source Visual Studio Code Without Trackers Launched   Wednesday 17 April

vscodiumAn open source version of Visual Studio Code that doesn't pass telemetry data back to Microsoft has been released. VSCodium aims to offer a more private development experience to Visual Studio developers. 

Apache Arrow Adds DataFusion Rust-Native Engine   Tuesday 16 April

asf logoApache Arrow has been updated with the addition of the DataFusion Rust-Native query engine for the Arrow columnar format. 

Starting To Oust Sizzle From jQuery  
Tuesday 16 April

jquery3jQuery 3.4.0 has just been released. It is the last minor release on the 3.x branch and in preparation for the removal of the Sizzle selector engine from the next major release, jQuery 4.0, it deprecates Sizzle's, non-standard, positional selectors. 

EU Copyright Directive Passed Into Law  
Monday 15 April

eucopyrightdirectivesqThe EU Council of Ministers today approved the Copyright Directive, which includes the controversial Article 17 (formerly 13). The legislation was voted through by a majority of EU ministers despite opposition from Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland, and Sweden. 

Databricks Runtime for Machine Learning  
Monday 15 April

databrickslogoDatabricks Runtime for Machine Learning is now generally available, offering native integration with popular ML/DL frameworks, such as scikit-learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, and Horovod. 

The State Of AI According To Rodney Brooks  
Sunday 14 April

brooksAI - overhyped and oversold - or is it? Rodney Brooks, Robotics Professor at MIT, should know. He has been trying to apply it real world uses for a long time. He recently delivered the annual Sackler lecture under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences with the title "The Science of Deep Learning". 

Reconstructed Heath Robinson Codebreaking Machine Unveiled   Saturday 13 April

heathrobinsonnewThe latest addition to collection of World War II code breaking machines curated by UK's National Museum of Computing, a working Heath Robinson machine, has been unveiled after a seven-year reconstruction project. 

Microsoft Partners With HackerOne On Bug Bounty  
Friday 12 April

msbugbountyshieldMicrosoft's Bug Bounty program has been updated to pay out faster for valid vulnerabilities. The HackerOne hacker community has joined as a partner to speed up checks and handle payouts. 

Wing Python Improves Code Warnings   Friday 12 April

wingwlogoThere's a new version of Wing Python. Version 7 has an improved code warnings and code quality inspection system that includes built-in error detection and tight integration with pylint, pep8, and mypy. This release also adds a new data frame and array viewer. 

F# Adds Anonymous Records  
Thursday 11 April

fsharpF# 4.6 has been released with the addition of support for anonymous records. The new version of F# will be included in Visual Studio 2019 when it ships. 

Inaugural ACM Chuck Thacker Breakthrough Award   Thursday 11 April

ACMRosenblumThe ACM has announced that Mendel Rosenblum, co-founder of VMware and a professor of Computer Science at Stanford is to be the first recipient of the newly established Chuck Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award.

 

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If you want to delve into I Programmer's coverage of the news over the years, you can access I Programmer Weekly back to January 2012.

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Last Updated ( Saturday, 27 April 2019 )