Here’s some interesting thoughts from long-time Slashdot reader theodp: CNBC reports that the next frontier in the Microsoft, Google, Amazon cloud battle is over a world without code. Google recently acquired no-code app development platform AppSheet, Microsoft just launched a new public preview of its low-code Power Apps mobile app for iOS and Android, and there is speculation about an ‘Amazon…
Tag: coders
Major Union Launches Campaign To Organize Video Game, Tech Workers
A new campaign launched Tuesday by one of the nation’s largest labor unions — and spearheaded by one of the leading video game industry activists in Southern California — aims to organize video game studios and tech offices to form or join a union. The Los Angeles Times reports: The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE for short) is a new…
Should Coal Miners Learn To Code?
During a campaign event on Monday, U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden “suggested coal miners could simply learn to code to transition to ‘jobs of the future,'” reports Newsweek: “Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but we don’t think of it that way,” he said… “Anybody who…
Guido van Rossum Explains How Python Makes Thinking in Code Easier
Dropbox’s Work in Progress blog shared a 2000-word “conversation with the creator of the world’s most popular programming language,” noting that many computer science schools are switching over from Java to Python, and arguing that “JavaScript still owns the web, and Java runs 2.5 billion Android phones, but for general purpose programming and education, Python has become the default standard.” They…
NPM Adds Command-Line Option To Help Fund Open-Source Coders
“Despite its own solvency concerns, NPM Inc on Tuesday deployed code changes that add a ‘funding’ command to the latest version of the npm command-line tool, namely v6.13.0,” reports the Register: Henceforth, developers creating packages for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js can declare metadata that describes where would-be donors can go to offer financial support. Doing so involves adding a funding…
Python Creator Guido van Rossum Retires, Heads To Python Conference
“Guido van Rossum, the creator of the hugely popular Python programming language, is leaving cloud file storage firm Dropbox and heading into retirement,” reports ZDNet: That ends his six and half years with the company, which hired in him in 2013 because so much of its functionality was built on Python. And, after last year stepping down from his leadership role…
‘Codes of Conduct: Speech Bans Are Poor Strategy’
Christine Peterson, a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986 and coined the term “Open Source software” among other things writes: I am currently cited on the home page of the Ethical Source Movement, home of the Ethical Source Definition: “In the twenty years since Christine Peterson first coined the term ‘open source’, our community…
Do Coders Crave a Sense of Control?
This week Stack Overflow’s CEO/founder Joel Spolsky spoke to Clive Thompson, the tech journalist who just published the new book Coders: the Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World . “It’s a sort of ethnographic history of this particular tribe,” explains a blog post at Stack Overflow, “examining how software developers fit into the world of business…
For Young Female Coders, Internship Interviews Can Be Toxic
An anonymous reader shares a report: Eyre (an anecdote in the story) is one of more than 1,000 young women college-aged or older, hailing from 300 schools around the country, who participated in a recent survey [PDF] about the challenges female engineers face while applying for technical internships. The study was conducted last fall by Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization…
New AI-Assisted Coding Tool Called ‘Amazing’
An anonymous reader quotes The Verge’s AI and Robotics reporter: By scanning huge datasets of text, machine learning software can produce convincing samples of everything from short stories to song lyrics. Now, those same techniques are being applied to the world of coding with a new program called Deep TabNine, a “coding autocompleter.” Programmers can install it as an add-on in…