| The 12 News Days of Xmas 08 - August |
| Written by Editor | |||
| Monday, 31 December 2018 | |||
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August - the silly season in full swing, but we do have SIGGRAPH to keep us entertained. This was the year that Python made the news in all sorts of ways. If you needed more proof that Python was the language of the year, you only had to look at the IEEE rankings. An interesting question - why is Python taking over those parts that JavaScript doesn't satisfy? The IEEE Spectrum ranking of the top programming languages has been published and, unsurprisingly, Python is at the top of the list for the second year in a row. The big surprise is that Assembly has entered the Top 10 in the default ranking, that is tuned to the interests of a typical IEEE member. More to the point does it really matter what language we use? You will meet all sorts of advocates for every language on the planet and they all claim that using there particular language makes life easy and rewarding but - all mainstream languages are Turing complete and you can achieve the same results in all of them. Does it really make a difference which language you choose? Now we have some limited evidence that Kotlin is better for you than Java. When Google introduced Kotlin as a fully supported language for Android development, a lot of programmers raised a cheer. The question is why? Can a language make a difference? And if languages can make you a better programmer then Julia, the language for number crunching scientists reached version 1.0 and hit the main stream. Later in the year it, or rather its creators would win a big prize. Julia 1.0 has been released after almost a decade of work. Julia has been designed to be open source, fast, dynamic, usable for general programming and more specialist areas such as statistics. In the middle of the month we hit SIGGRAPH and could enjoy all the cool videos of things we never believed could be simulated or computed in real time. Yes, it's that time of year again - SIGGRAPH the most important graphics conference and show on the planet opened for full business today and, as always, there are more videos to look at than time to view. Here are some of the most interesting. Seemingly returning to the silly season - chaff bugs?! While we work hard at getting the bugs out of our programs perhaps we should replace them with some made up bugs that fool the hacker into thinking they have found an exploitable flaw - and so waste their time. Why not? Computer security is more about psychology than technology. The idea that bugs could be a good thing is not a natural one to most programmers - or it shoudn't be. Bugs not only crash your program, they are ways for bad people to get into your code. Perhaps more bugs could be used to hide the really dangerous bugs? Another one that could be considered sill is computing with trains. When you realize how common place the ability to computer is it is a revaluation. You can never look at the world in the same way. It is not that we are living in a simulation we are living in and alongside computers. It is amazing what is Turing complete. It seems that all you need is something to implement a universal gate and you're home and dry. But trains? Duplo trains in this case, have some powerful, almost hidden, computational abilities. Are they Turing complete? Of course they are. A repeating theme this year is the way people wanted to see revolt against the app stores every where. There is a revolt but it seems to be a fairly small, if determined one. This is not the people rising up against a uniformly perceived evil just a few well informed and motivated agents trying to raise the profile of the issue. A new report, and a Bloomberg commentary on it, claims that there is a revolt against the app stores building. Given the current state of the market this seems reasonable, but is it true? There are some interesting statistics to suggest that Apple and Google really need to hope it isn't. Returning to silly, but fun, why not use AI to improve your dance steps. Well, not exaclty your dance steps but you can still look good making the moves in a video you never made. Put on Your Dancing Shoes With AI Using a deep learning based algorithm, researchers have produced videos in which untrained amateurs appear to have mastered the dance moves of pop stars, perform martial arts kicks and spin and twirl gracefully like ballerinas. Quietly at the end of August version 7 of Babel rolled out. It is interesting how quickly a project can go from "vital" to "optional" and then presumably "redundant". Open source projects are particularly sad when the fire goes out. Babel is still used by many but with Web Assembly on the horizon our attention has shifted else where. Babel was once the lifesaver for many JavaScript projects. It took "future" JavaScript and compiled it to "current" JavaScript. But now the future has arrived, almost, and the question is do we need a compile step to slow things down? Open source seems to be developing a problem that came to everyone's attention at the end of August. The problem is the way that online services make money, and big money, by taking open source code and making it available for use. At one level this is good because the code is out there but they charge a premium and make a profit and it is rare for any of this to be returned to the community. The commons clause is an attempt to put this injustice right but some are saying that it destroys the whole idea of open source. The current debate about the Commons Clause, and other attempts to place restrictions on open source licences, is dividing opinion. But before taking sides first we need to understand what the Commons Clause does and why it is necessary. 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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 11 September 2019 ) |
