Featured Articles

Programmer's Guide To Theory - Aleph Zero The First Transfinite
Mike James

Infinity is a concept that mathematicians are supposed to understand and love but I argue that infinity is more at home in computer science and to understand it you need to know what it looks like. This is what this extract from Chapter 6 of my recent book is all about.

Konrad Zuse and the First Working Computers
Historian

You may well never have heard of Konrad Zuse, but he has a better claim than most to be the man who invented the programmable computer in the sense of actually building one. In fact, he built several and a manual has recently been discovered for the Z4, built in 1945 and the world's oldest surviving computer.

News and Comment

Java Devs - Where, What, How
30 Sep | Janet Swift

Java celebrated its 25th birthday earlier this year and has subsequently seen the general availability of Java 15. Judged to be the second most used programming language, surpassed only by JavaScript, it is estimated to be regularly used by 6.8 million professional developers worldwide. 

Github's code analysis technology based on CodeQL, which it acquired as part of its purchase of Semmie in 2019, is now out of beta and generally available.

Back in March 2020 Google temporarily suspended publishing Chrome paid extensions. Now it has announced that this ban has been made permanent and from February 2021 all paid Chrome extensions will lose access to payments through the Chrome Web Store.

Introducing a free, self-paced, quick and official course, one of of Oracle's Dev Gym quizzes, about the concepts and syntax behind SQL's Analytic functions.

The Linux Foundation has announced that its Introduction to Linux training course, currently in its sixth edition on edX, has had over one million enrollments. This course was the first on edX from the Linux Foundation and now there are many more. 

Cockroach Labs has introduced Pebble, which is described as a RocksDB inspired and RocksDB compatible key-value store. Until now, CockroachDB has used RocksDB as its key-value store, but Pebble provides more control over future enhancements tailored for CockroachDB’s needs.

As editor of I Programmer, I'm keen on the history of computer programming and this week I've come across a new resource - a series of podcasts in which Lex Fridman interviews some of the biggest names in computer science.

With Unicode 14.1 delayed because of Coronavirus, it looked as though we were going to be deprived of a new crop of emojis to puzzle over, but good news - there's going to be a minor emoji release for 2021.

Mozilla's mission is to ensure that the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. As this seems laudable, we've tended to regard Mozilla itself as a good role model. Currently the evidence points the other way.

This might be a trap that you want to get caught in, but it is worth appreciating just how clever it is. This is Microsoft at its Bill Gatesian best. GitHub Codespaces is an attractive lure to get you using Azure, VS Code and, of course, GitHub.

Google has announced that Flutter, its open source mobile UI framework for crafting native interfaces on iOS and Android, will now support Windows as a target operating system.