Featured Articles

Programmer's Guide To Theory - The Halting Problem
Mike James

Once we have the Church-Turing thesis and the prime model of computation the Turing machine, it is time to ask what computations are out of reach. If you have not encountered these ideas before then prepared to be shocked and puzzled. However paradoxical it may all sound, it is, perhaps at the expense of some mysticism, very easy to understand.

Logic never goes wrong but in this case a simple refactoring of an if block seem to give a different result, even though it does exactly the same thing. Or does it? This Programmer Puzzle explores a gotcha in PHP

News

How is Java Doing?
18 Dec | Nikos Vaggalis

At this time of year surveys summing up the year bombard us from all sides. Here we have Baeldung's take on the state of Java In 2019.

WebAssembly has been adopted by W3C and is now an official web standard. This doesn't mean it is ready to use, however.

Ramda, a library which makes functional programming in JavaScript easy, gets its own playground. We take a look around and come up with a recommendation.

Not really random. Not even pseudo random, more stuff that caught my attention and that I, for one, would like to be given. And, yes, if I'm not given them, I'd probably buy some of these.

It is estimated that at least 15% of the world's population consists of people with disabilities. This  translates to millions who have the same right to information as the rest. The W3C has provided a course on the edX platform to help cater for this often under-served web audience.

Mozilla DeepSpeech has been updated with support for TensorFlow Lite, resulting in a smaller package size and faster performance on some platforms.

Computer graphics isn't the same thing as simulation. It doesn't have to be accurate, it simply has to look right. What about baking? Watch bread, cookies and pancakes cook in "fake baking" mode.

It is legend that programmers run on coffee so what better than a new mug with an appropriate slogan? You could boost your favourite programmer's performance by encouraging increased coffeee consumption.

Google has launched the Android Game SDK, a set of libraries for Android game developers.

There's a new version of Django, the high-level Python Web framework that lets you create dynamic websites. Django takes care of user authentication, content administration, site maps and RSS feeds to make website development easier.

There's a new add-on for dtSearch's Database Indexer that extends the options so it works with SQL, including on Azure and AWS.

Netflix has open sourced Metaflow, which the developers describe as a human-centric framework for data science. The framework has been used internally at Netflix for the last two years to build and manage hundreds of data-science projects. 

Books of the Week

Full Review

Haskell From The Very Beginning (Coherent Press)

Added to Book Watch

The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 5 (Addison-Wesley Professional)

Hands-On Docker for Microservices with Python (Packt)

The Definitive Guide to Modern Java Clients with JavaFX (Apress)