Feature Articles

Programmer's Guide To Theory - Why Recursion
Mike James

So you know what recursion is, but do you know why it is? This is what this extract from Chapter 15 the latest book by Mike James is all about. Once we get past the definition: Recursion, see Recursion we go on to look at where it is and is not useful.

The Monty Hall problem is an exercise in probability theory that even experts get wrong. It seems to be subtle and even paradoxical, but when you notice exactly what is going on it becomes obvious. Read this article and I guarantee you will understand the Monty Hall problem and recognize when it occurs in other settings. 

Although not as important as it once was, jQuery 3.5 has just been announced and it is still JavaScript's standard library.

GitHub is making core premium features free for everyone. The Microsoft-owned software hosting and collaboration company has announced that companies can create and use private development repositories without having to pay fees.

How old do you have to be to be counted as an old developer? A new study suggests that you could be seen old at 30 - which is well under the average age of software developers.

Apache Flink has released Stateful Functions 2, the first version of its event-driven database that includes the feature of stateful functions, small piece of codes that are invoked through a message.  

There's a new release of Nim, the systems programming language, formerly called Nimrod. This update features a new garbage collector and new sugar macros.

One of the unexpected side effects of the corona virus pandemic is a chronic shortage of COBOL programmers. The Open Mainframe Project has launched new initiatives in response to the call for help and IBM plans to provide free training in the legacy language.

How much awesomeness can you fit in only 140 characters of JavaScript and a (HTML) canvas? Part of the demoscene, Dwitter hosts small but powerful user-contributed JavaScript snippets that run in the browser and do amazing things.

John Conway, the mathematician who will be forever known to many programmers as the man who invented The Game of Life, died on April 11, 2020 at the age of 82, a victim of COVID-19. 

Some of our articles deserve a second outing. Here we have one such from last September to add to our occasional Too Good to Miss series. It's about a video animation of how the websites you know and cherished ebbed and flowed in popularity over the last quarter of a century. Watch and be amazed. 

In yet another offering during the pandemic, Microsoft has made a number of Minecraft Worlds available for free until June 30.

The GNOME Foundation, in partnership with Endless, has announced a competition the goal of which is to encourage individuals or teams to submit stimulating ideas that will connect the next generation of coders to the free and open-source software (FOSS) community and keep them involved for years to come. 

ACM has named Maria-Florina Balcan of Carnegie Mellon University as the recipient of the 2019 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, for influential and pioneering work in machine learning which has solved longstanding open problems.  

There's a minor upgrade to Babel ahead of the 8.0 release expected in the next few months. The current update adds support for TypeScript 3.8 and improves the optimization for JSX transforms.