Programming Book Choices For Fun
Kay Ewbank

There are lots of books on the 'mainstream' programming languages such as C++, JavaScript, Python, but what should you buy if you're wanting to encourage someone with the fun of programming, to either a child or a non-techie?

Compilers are an essential part of using a computer - but there was a time when they simply didn't exist. First we had to realize that we needed such a thing and then we had to figure out how to build it.

The two languages that are making headline news in the TIOBE Index for April 2021 are Objective-C which has left the top 20 and Fortran which is back there after more than 10 years.

Project Bergamot is an initiative to provide client-side machine spoken language translation in Firefox. Under development since 2019 this work-in-progress it is now available in Firefox Nightly. Currently, it is possible to translate Spanish and Estonian to English and vice versa, and English to German.

There's a new milestone release of Apache Isis, the framework for developing UIs for domain-driven apps in Java. It provides JPA persistence support as an alternative to JDO and includes support for Spring Data. 

JetBrains has released the initial version of Projector, an open source tool and framework for running JetBrains IDEs and Swing apps remotely over your network.

At long last the 10 year case between Oracle and Google over the copyright or otherwise of the APIs used in Android is settled, the SCOTUS verdict is in.

In a recent Lex Fridman podcast, Brendan Eich, the creator 25 years ago of JavaScript and currently of the Brave browser, provided his views on early programming languages,  JavaScript and Firefox and explains how his new browser takes a different approach.

A new video from Festo shows its flock of five BionicSwifts moving gracefully in a coordinated and autonomous manner. Thanks to the way their wings are modelled on the plumage of real birds, these BionicSwifts have an even more convincing flight profile than previously.

For 2021 the Imagine Cup became an all-digital challenge and is now entering it's final phase with four teams selected to compete in the World Championship for a top prize of USD $75,000 and mentorship with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella.   

Pluralsight is again giving free, unlimited access to its entire library of more than 7,000 video courses for the entire month of April. New users have to sign up with an email address but don't need to provide credit card details.

A new April Fools joke is no joke as it reveals what others think of us. In particular Stack Overflow should know better than to bring its own programming methodology into disrepute...

JetBrains DataGrip has been updated with support for Azure MFA and the ability to edit data in MongoDB via its UI. This is the first of DataGrip's regular updates in 2021, hence the version number of 2021.1.