Featured Articles

Fundamental C - Compilation & Preprocessor
Harry Fairhead

This extract, from Harry Fairhead's book on programming C in an IoT context, explains the way that programs are compiled and looks in detail at the preprocessor stage - perhaps the most misused C facility.

Go is renowned for its easy-to-use approach to concurrency - it is part of the language. In this final part of our look at the key points of Go we look in depth at how goroutines and channels work together to orchestrate concurrency and parallelism.

News

Languages To Learn And Earn
19 Feb | Janet Swift

The 2020 HackerRank survey attracted responses from 116,000 developers from all parts of the globe. In our final look at its results we consider its findings about the languages that hiring managers want, the languages developers know and the ones they want to learn next.

A new survey of companies using COBOL and mainframes found they're planning to modernize their existing apps rather than start again with new languages.

Continuing our broad foray into the Java ecosystem we look at the most popular choices in Java's runtime platforms, framework technologies, IDEs, PaaS providers, databases and, of course, JDKs, with the much debated Oracle JDK versus OpenJDK.

GitHub has released an open-source command line tool that you can use to issue pull requests and work with issues from the command line. GitHub CLI is now in beta for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

The long ongoing, but not for too much longer, dispute between Oracle and Google about the use of code from the Java SDK in Android has reached a new stage. Oracle has outlined its case to the Supreme Court and it seems to be a strong one.

The latest version of Apache Groovy is available with with a brand new parser (code-named Parrot) among other improvements. Groovy is an optionally typed and dynamic language, with static-typing and static compilation capabilities, for the Java platform.

Put cellular automata together with neural networks and you might be able to grow a salamander - or anything else you like. This work, from Google AI, casts much light on the difficult topic of morphogenesis, how cells organize themselves into shapes.

PrintFixer is a new AI-based tool that can get a 3D print right in fewer attempts. Put another way, you don't have to be an expert any more because AI can do the job for you.

Delphi, the event-driven programming language for rapid application development (RAD) is celebrating its 25th Anniversary with a Webinar.

The TinyGo development team has announced that TinyGo is now officially a Google sponsored project. The announcement was made at FOSDEM 2020, the European Meeting of the Free and Open source Software Developers.

In the decade since the launch of its original Chrome-focused bug bounty program, Google has paid out more than $21 million  to security researchers with 2019 seeing a record of $6.5 million in rewards.

Microsoft Research has released an open source library that's compatible with PyTorch. DeepSpeed is a deep learning optimization library that makes it easier to work with large models for training, making it possible to train 100-billion-parameter models.

Books of the Week

Full Review

Effective Python, 2nd Ed

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Mike James recommends this book with:

I can't promise that reading this will make you a better Python programmer, but it can't make you worse and you will, assuming you really do like Python and programming, have fun reading it. I suppose you could say it's as much fun as you can have without actually programming...

Added to Book Watch

Pro T-SQL 2019 (Apress)

Mastering Python Networking (Packt)