The Java SDK implementation of the Model Context Protocol gets to pre-release version 0.70, opening the way for Java to enjoy transparent interoperability with AI services.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced that nominations are open for this year's Free Software Awards. These prestigious awards demonstrate appreciation of the efforts of members of the free software community and anybody can make a nomination.

C++ is a language under attack from newer languages such as Rust and from more primitive languages such as C, yet it has a large community of committed and enthusiastic users. How can things be made better? Its creator Bjarne Stroustrup has some ideas.

Go 1.24 has been released. This version adds support for generic type aliases, and is also faster.

This week Christie's is running its inaugural AI art auction. With the title Augmented Intelligence, it is billed as the first ever artificial intelligence-dedicated sale at a major auction house and has a raised vociferous protest from thousands of artists who regard the technology behind the works as committing "mass theft". 

If you've not visited I Programmer before, this Weekly Digest gives you a taster. It has links to the latest feature articles and to our wide ranging news with its mix of analysis and comment. It also lists the week's addition to Book Watch Archive and a full Book Review. In this week's top feature Nikos Vaggalis asks Where's Java Going In 2025?

Microsoft Build is taking place in what has become its "usual" slot - the beginning of the penultimate week of May - and in its "home" location, Seattle. This year Google I/O clashes with it, starting on Day 2 of Build. However, as it is almost entirely virtual, you can "be" at both if you want to.

The Games Development World Championship 2025 is open for entries. The GDWC competition has two new categories this year - Best Discord Game Award and Proceduralism Award, joining the existing categories of Best Indie Game, Best Studio Game, Best Hobby Game, Best Mobile Game, and Best Student Game.

The latest update of Visual Studio Code is now available with free use of GitHub Copilot and the ability to debug Python directly from the terminal.

JetBrains has announced that it is abandoning its plan to create a standalone Kotlin Multiplatform IDE and is planning to deprecate support for KMP on its lightweight Fleet IDE in order to focus its efforts on better KMP support on the IntelliJ Platform.

Python 3.14, which should really be called Pi-thon, has seen its fifth alpha release. It introduces a new interpreter that can be as much 30% faster, depending on what you are doing.

JetBrains has added support for Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Haiku 3.5, OpenAI's o1, o1-mini, and o3-mini models to its AI-powered coding tool, AI Assistant, along with local LLM support via LM Studio, allowing users to connect AI chat to locally hosted models.

Memgraph has released an update to its graph database. The update aims to make it easier to build AI solutions powered by graph technology.

FerretDB has been updated to version 2.0, which the company says offers major improvements in performance, compatibility, support, and flexibility. In practical terms, the main change is a move to use Microsoft's DocumentDB PostgreSQL extension, which is behind a twenty times performance improvement

GitHub has announced new features for GitHub Copilot to streamline coding tasks. Copilot will now predict what a developer might be going to type next based on what they have already typed. The tool also gets the ability for its agents to implement changes across multiple files.

Amazon has announced the general availability of AWS Glue 5.0, with improved performance, enhanced security, and support for Amazon Sagemaker Unified Studio and Sagemaker Lakehouse.

The 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize has been awarded to Yoshua Bengio, Bill Dally, Geoffrey Hinton, John Hopfield, Jensen Huang, Yann LeCun, and Fei-Fei Li. The seven 2025 Laureates share the £500,000 prize for groundbreaking engineering innovation which is of global benefit to humanity.

As well as listing the week's news items, our weekly digest includes the latest Book Review and additions to Book Watch. In this week's top featured articles Harry Fairhead provides a first example of using Pulse Width Modulation on the ESP32 using C and the Espressif IDF. We also look back to the 1960's when Fortran, Cobol and Algol were dominant.