April Week 5
Written by Editor   
Saturday, 04 May 2019

If you want to keep up with what's important from the point of view of the developer, you can rely on the IProgrammer team to sift through the news to select items that are of interest and to gather and review the books you might want to read. This week's articles explore Basic Structs in C and a history article about the creators of the language, Ritchie & Thompson.

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April 25 - May 1, 2019 

The Core

Fundamental C - Basic Structs  
Monday 29 April

CbookcoverThe struct is perhaps the more sophisticated of the two “native” data structures that C has, the other being the array. It is true to say that with an array and a struct you can do just about anything, but to do anything safely you need to know exactly how structs work. This extract, from my new book on programming C in an IoT context, explains the basics of structs without confusion. 

History

Ritchie & Thompson - Creators of C and Unix  
Thursday 25 April

KendennisDennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson produced Unix and C, both groundbreaking foundations of computing today. Here is an account of how it all happened. 

Book Review of the Week

Mike James awards a rating of 4 out of 5 in a detailed review of this introductory book and concludes:
So if you want a short, relatively cheap and incomplete overview of operating systems you might want to consider this book.

New Listings in Book Watch  

 

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News

Supreme Court Asks For Government Help In Oracle v Google   Wednesday 01 May

The U.S. Supreme Court has again requested the views of the U.S. solicitor general with regard to Google's petition asking for a judicial review of the copyright issues stemming from the Oracle v Google Lawsuit. 

Mozilla's Annual Checkup On the Web  
Tuesday 30 April

ihrep19sqSince 2017 the Mozilla Foundation has published an annual look at what is happening on the internet today, and how it is impacting us for good or bad. The 2019 Internet Health Report is now available as a website and there's a Short Version (pdf) for reading offline.  

ZetaSQL Parser & Analyzer Code Released
Tuesday 30 April

googleiconGoogle has started the process of open sourcing ZetaSQL, a SQL front-end that consists of a parser and analyzer. It is designed to work with a variety of back ends, and could be a rival for Apache Calcite in the JVM ecosystem. 

 

Major New Release of Wolfram Language and Mathematica  Monday 29 April

wolflogoThere are new versions of Wolfram language and Mathematica. Release 12 offers improvements in support for chemistry, geometry, numerical uncertainty and database integration. We highlight just a few of the many improvements and additions.

Microsoft Updates PWABuilder  
Monday 29 April

pwabuilderMicrosoft has updated PWABuilder, its open source tool for converting Web applications to Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). which act more like native desktop/mobile apps with the help of several technologies. 

Sorting Algorithms As Art  
Sunday 28 April

sortsqSorting algorithms are fundamental to computer science and writing one of your own will teach you a lot. There are many different approaches to sorting - but one thing they share in common is that they are better understood when visualized. 

Magnetic Core Memory For Arduino  
Saturday 27 April

core1Nope, not a misprint - it really is core memory and it really works, even if it is only 32 bits! 

Databricks Delta Lake Now Open Source  
Friday 26 April

databricksAt the Spark +AI Summit taking place this week in San Francisco, Databricks announced that it has open sourced its Delta Lake storage layer, which handles the stage where data is brought into an organization's data lake. 

Python & WebAssembly Plus Science Equals Pyodide   Friday 26 April

pyodidelogoBased on Iodide, we now have Pyodide which allows a Python interpreter to run inside the browser and create living documents there, thus bringing data science to the browser. 

Mozilla WebThings Beyond Experimental  
Thursday 25 April

mozthinggateway1WebThings just graduated from being in an experimental phase to something more serious, but this sort of home IoT is a tough nut to crack. Can we trust Mozilla to be there after we invest time and effort? 

Red Hat Takes Over OpenJDK Maintenance  
Thursday 25 April

correttoRed Hat is taking over the stewardship of OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 from Oracle. This means Red Hat will look after aspects such as security patches and bug fixes for the two OpenJDK releases. Updates may still come from Oracle, Red Hat, or other providers. 


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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, 04 May 2019 )