Featured Articles

Applying C - Signals
Harry Fairhead

Signals are the POSIX way of implementing software interrupts. They are used to inform user-space programs that something has happened and they are also used to terminate a program. Going beyond this they can be generated by user-mode programs to signal to other programs.

There is currently a small debate going on about the relationship between programming and math. Not "do you need math" to be a programmer but "does teaching programming help math or vice versa"?

News

OpenSilver - Silverlight Reborn?
11 Mar | Mike James

There are many programmers who regret the passing of Silverlight - it was a great idea. Could it be that modern technology can bring it back from the dead? OpenSilver is an open source attempt at doing just that.

In a very unusual occurrence, there has been a ranking change at the very top of the RedMonk Language Rankings - Python  is now in joint second place with Java. JavaScript still holds the coveted #1 slot. How does this accord with the latest TIOBE index?

Eric S Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative and its president for the first six years, has been banned from two OSI mailing lists following messages whose tone violated the code of conduct.

A new JavaScript parser has been developed that supports parsing for versions from ES6 to ES2020 syntax and language features. The developer describes it as "pixel perfect" and 100 percent spec compliant.

In the TIOBE Index for March 2020 the top two languages, Java and C, consolidated their positions with a relatively large percentage change in their favor. At the bottom of the top 20 list Delphi/Object Pascal saw a relatively small decline, but enough to seal its fate of falling off the table. 

Apache Brooklyn, an open source framework for modelling, monitoring, and managing applications, has reached version 1.0, and added facilities for public and private clouds.

As you may have noticed from the Google Doodle, today is International Women's Day. This year's theme is #EachforEqual  and focuses on achieving gender equality, an issue that is very important for the IT industry.

After over 20 years of using thousands of personal computers around using the world to analyze signals coming from outer space to locate traces of life beyond Earth, the SETI@home program has as much data as it can handle and is going into hibernation.

South by Southwest, the annual film, music and tech conference due to start on March 13 in Austin Texas, has been called off a week before it wes due to start. The annoucement came after the city authorities issued an order for it to be cancelled due to concerns around the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.

Scala.js has been updated to version 1.0 following seven years of development. The new release offers improvements to its runtime performance, increased support for JavaScript libraries, and Improved portability with respect to Scala/JVM.

A new report from HackerRank reveals that 61% of smaller companies have a time-to-hire under 30 days, compared to 38% of larger companies and that Full Stack developers are the hardest to find for companies of all sizes.

An API for GitHub Actions has been released in a public beta. The Actions API provides a way to manage GitHub Actions via a REST API, with facilities for handling workflows, repository secrets, artifacts, and self-hosted runners.

Books of the Week

Full Review

• Supercharged Python
  Rating: 3 (out of 5) Reviewed by Mike James

Added to Book Watch

• Introducing Machine Learning (Microsoft Press)
• JavaScript, 6th Ed (In Easy Steps)
• Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning (Mercury Learning)