Programmer's Python - Closure

Mike James

Closure - what's that all about. As it happens it's all surprisingly logical once you know why Python implements closure.  Closure motivated and explained in this extract from my book, Programmer's Python: Everything is an Object.

Casting is one of the most confusing aspects of any modern language and it often makes beginners think hard. But if you know why you are doing it then the how makes a lot more sense.

On April 1st Stack Overflow played a prank that had some of its community really worried - it was going to make us pay for copying code. But as with all good jokes there was a payoff. Stack Overflow was able to quantify not only the extent the copying happens but give details of what is copied.

Node.js, the JavaScript runtime, is available with built-in support for Apple Silicon for the first time. The new release also improves its support for Promises, and has the updated 9.0 release of the V8 JavaScript engine.

Ingenuity has made its maiden flight on Mars. It may only have lasted a few seconds, but signals an incredible achievement. It was done thanks to open source software and the nearly 12,000 developers who, mostly unknowingly, contributed to projects used now have the Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on their GitHub profiles. 

Microsoft has released details of Visual Studio 2022, a preview of which will be released this summer. The headline change is that the new version will be 64-bit.

Rust seems to be the great saviour of programming at the moment and Microsoft is the latest to jump on the bandwagon with Rust for Windows.

RubyMine 2021.1 has been released with improvements including Ruby 3.0 RBS support and better code completion. Other improvements include space integration and the inclusion of Code With Me.

The Guinness World Record for the number of UAVs - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones - airborne simultaneously has been broken again. Watch the spectacle and consider the programming effort that must have been involved.

DevSkiller has released its third annual report on IT skills, revealing that Australian developers score the highest on coding tests and that Australia comes second only to Switzerland in terms of annual salary for software developers.

Amazon has announced an open source search and analytics suite. OpenSearch is an open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Gradle is a tool that always stirs arguments among developers. Let's see what version 7 brings and breaks.

The developers of Deno, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime from the creator of Node.js, have announced they've formed a company and had an injection of funds.