A high school computer science teacher claims there’s an “unacknowledged failure” of America’s computer science (CS) classes at the high school and junior high school level. “Visit classrooms and you’ll find students working with robotic sensors, writing games and animations in Scratch, interfacing with Arduino microcontrollers, constructing websites, and building apps with MIT App Inventor… “Look underneath the celebratory and self-congratulatory…
Tag: languages
Apple WatchOS 7 Unveiled With Sleep Tracking, Shareable Watch Faces and a Hand Washing Timer
At the WWDC 2020 keynote today, Apple unveiled WatchOS 7, adding sleep tracking features, shareable watch faces, a hand washing timer, and much more. CNET reports: WatchOS 7 adds much-anticipated sleep tracking features, including a Wind Down mode to help you get to bed on time. When you wake up, you’ll see a visualization of your previous night’s sleep, including periods…
Apple Announces macOS Big Sur With a Brand-New Design
Apple has unveiled the next version of macOS: Big Sur. From a report: The new operating system brings the biggest redesign since the introduction of macOS 10, according to Apple. Big Sur borrows a number of elements from Apple’s iOS, including a customizable Control Center, where you can change brightness and toggle Do Not Disturb, and a new notification center, which…
Has the Time Finally Come for Generics in Golang?
An anonymous reader quotes technology columnist Mike Melanson: The debate around adding generics to the Go programming language has been going on for years now, often with much resistance, but it’s starting to look like one proposal finally has some backing and general acceptance from the greater Go community — much to the surprise of some involved. Introduced this week…
Stack Overflow Explores Why Developers Love TypeScript More Than Python
Stack Overflow asked 65,000 programmers for their favorite programming language, and this year Microsoft’s TypeScript knocked Python from the #2 spot. So they interviewed Microsoft’s principal engineering lead for the language “to find out what about TypeScript makes it so dang lovable.” Q: Do you remember why the team came up with TypeScript, why you wanted to release something like this?…
Microsoft’s GitHub Offers Open-Source Developers ‘One Linter to Rule Them All’
“GitHub says it’s open-sourcing its in-house linting tool, the GitHub Super Linter, to clean up code,” reports ZDNet: Having a tool that checks source code for programming blunders and other errors is useful for developers. Now Microsoft-owned GitHub has released the ‘Super Linter’ to help developers avoid the hassles of setting up code repositories with multiple linters… GitHub describes it as…
Bjarne Stroustrup Releases 168-Page Paper on How C++ Thrived
Bjarne Stroustrup, the 69-year-old Danish creator of C++, just released a 168-page paper (published under a Creative Commons Attributions-NoDerivatives license) in the Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, detailing the growth of C++ from its 21st birthday in 2006 up through the year 2020. It begins by noting that by 2006, C++ “contained parts that had survived unchanged since introduced…
Python Overtakes Java? JetBrains Releases ‘State of Developer Ecosystem’ Survey
The creators of the Kotlin programming language — the Czech software development company Jetbrains — announced results from their annual “State of the Developer Ecosystem” survey. This year’s survey involved 19,696 developers in 18 countries, and found that: JavaScript is the most used overall programming language. Websites are the most common type of application developers work on. Python has overtaken Java…
Twitter Deletes Over 170,000 Accounts Tied To Chinese Propaganda Efforts
Twitter announced Thursday that it had deleted more than 170,000 accounts tied to a Chinese state-linked operation that were spreading deceptive information around the COVID-19 virus, political dynamics in Hong Kong, and other issues. The Hill reports: Almost 25,000 of the accounts that were deleted formed what Twitter described as the “core network,” while around 150,000 accounts were amplifying messages from…
Stack Overflow Investigates Why Developers Love Rust So Much
This year Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey of 65,000 programmers found that Rust was their most-loved programming language — for the fifth year in a row. To understand why, they interviewed the top contributor to the site’s Rust topic. (“The short answer is that Rust solves pain points present in many other languages, providing a solid step forward with a limited number…