Canvas can handle text, but can JavaScript handle Unicode? In this extract from my book on JavaScript Graphics, we look at the basics of working with Unicode characters on Canvas.

The 1970s saw the rise of programming languages created by small groups of people rather than committees or institutions and much of the cause was the number of personal computers that had appeared and were in need of software. This is the story of BASIC and Pascal, both of which have faded away after four decades, and C which is still in its heyday.

Firefox is removing its experimental support for installing Progressive Web Apps to the desktop. Whether or not this really constitutes giving up on PWA depends on your point of view, but I think it is disappointing, both for PWA and for Firefox.

The moment we've been anticipating for months has arrived. TIOBE has announced its Language of the Year for 2020 and, as predicted, it is Python. This is a historic first as Python is the only language to have gained this accolade four times.

Apache Camel has been updated to version 3.7, and there is also an updated version of the Camel Kafka connector.

Apache NetBeans has been updated to offer improved support for Java 14 and 15 with support for code coloring and formatting alongside handling of new Java language features by autocomplete. The release also contains VSNetBeans, an extension for Visual Studio Code.

The fifth major release of Bash has been released with improvements including a rework of the way pathname expansion is handled.

2020 turned out well for Computer Science education. The Hour of Code reached the milestone of over 1 billion engagements worldwide, in the US the College Board reported a 13% growth in the AP Computer Science exams and in the UK there was a 7.6% increase year-on-year in the number of people accepted on to computer science degrees.

This news item from August 2020 is already remembered as when something new happened in AI. I suppose you say that the unreasonable effectiveness of OpenAI's GPT language program is just a special case of the unreasonable effectiveness of Deep Learning but ... it is so much more shocking.

No not bagpipe drones - the flying kind. Just in case you don't know, Hogmanay is how Scots welcome in the New Year. This is the first time I've seen a drone display that beats fireworks.

Ruby 3 has been released. This major new version has goals of improving performance, concurrency and support for Typing. The headline improvement is the performance, with Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, the chief designer of Ruby, saying that Ruby 3 will be three times faster than Ruby 2. 

Some of our news items deserve a second chance. This one reflects on something that happened in 2020 that wasn't all bad. Microsoft Solitaire turned 30, and Microsoft marked the occasion with a world-record-breaking attempt for the most games played in a single day.