An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hackaday: The BBC has a long history of teaching the world about computers. The broadcaster's name was proudly displayed on the BBC Micro, and BBC Basic was the programming language developed especially for that computer. Now, BBC Basic is back and running on a whole mess of modern platforms. BBC Basic for SDL 2.0 will run on Windows, MacOS, x86 Linux, and even Raspberry Pi OS, Android, and iOS. Desktop versions of the programming environment feature a BASIC editor that has syntax coloring for ease of use, along with luxury features like search and replace that weren't always available at the dawn of the microcomputer era. Meanwhile, the smartphone versions feature a simplified interface designed to work better in a touchscreen environment.

It's weird to see, but BBC Basic can actually do some interesting stuff given the power of modern hardware. It can address up to 256 MB of memory, and work with far more advanced graphical assets than would ever have been possible on the original BBC Micro. If you honed your programming skills on that old metal, you might be impressed with what they can achieve with BBC Basic in a new, more powerful context.

Slashdot reader sysadminafterdark writes: Released on November 26, 2020, PHP 8 brought many optimizations and powerful features to the language.Fast forward to today, and PHP 8 is getting the boot in favor of 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 with 8.4 in development. This leaves some websites at risk of breaking and potential security issues. Hearing of this news, I upgraded my own blog and wrote an article on how to add the Remi repository and update. I run Enterprise Linux (The best distro out there) so if you are standing up new boxes, just keep in mind the PHP in the repo is deprecated.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The Linux Foundation recently funded a new "security developer in residence" position for Python. (It's funded through the Linux Foundation's own "Open Software Security foundation", which has a stated mission of partnering with open source project maintainers "to systematically find new, as-yet-undiscovered vulnerabilities in open source code, and get them fixed to improve global software supply chain security.") The position went to the lead maintainer for the HTTP client library urllib3, the most downloaded package on the Python Package Index with over 10 billion downloads. But he hopes to create a ripple effect by demonstrating the impact of security investments in critical communities — ultimately instigating a wave of improvements to all software supply chains. (And he's also documenting everything for easy replication by other communities...)

So far he's improved the security of Python's release processes with signature audits and security-hardening automation. But he also learned that CVE numbers were being assigned to newly-discovered vulnerabilities by the National Cyber Security Division of the America's Department of Homeland Security — often without talking to anyone at the Python project. So by August he'd gotten the Python Software Foundation authorized as a CVE Numbering Authority, which should lead to more detailed advisories (including remediation information), now reviewed and approved by Python's security response teams.

"The Python Software wants to help other Open Source organizations, and will be sharing lessons learned," he writes in a blog post. And he now says he's already been communicating with the Curl program about his experiences to help them take the same step, and even authored a guide to the process for other open source projects.

GameMaker announced that it will be free to use for noncommercial, non-console projects, breaking away from Unity and its massive pricing controversy that saw game developers boycotting the engine. The company is also "eliminating its indie / creator tier monthly subscription fee in favor of a one-time paid licensing fee of $99," reports The Verge. "Additionally, if you're currently enrolled at the indie / creator tier and wish to pay the licensing fee, the subscription fees you've paid will be discounted from the price." The Verge: Russell Kay, head of GameMaker, said that the changes were a way for the company to express its thanks to users, explaining that, since 2021, GameMaker has seen its user base triple in size. Kay also had some subtle but effective shade for GameMaker's competitors. "We have seen other platforms making awkward moves with their pricing and terms, so we thought, what if we did the opposite, something that could actually be good for developers?" Kay wrote in the announcement.

Though customers currently enrolled in an enterprise-level subscription will see no changes to their plans, it seems like GameMaker is counting on the pricing update to draw more people to the software. "Our success is measured by the number of people making games!" Kay wrote.

Python "come with downsides," argues a new article in Communications of the ACM. "Its programs tend to run slowly, and because it is inefficient at running processes in parallel, it is not well suited to some of the latest AI programming."

"Hoping to overcome those difficulties, computer scientist Chris Lattner set out to create a new language, Mojo, which offers the ease of use of Python, but the performance of more complex languages such as C++ or Rust." Lattner tells the site "we don't want to break Python, we want to make Python better," while software architect Doug Meil says Mojo is essentially "Python for AI... and it's going to be way faster in scale across multiple hardware platforms." Lattner teamed up with Tim Davis, whom he had met when they both worked for Google, to form Modular in January 2022. The company, where Lattner is chief executive officer and Davis chief product officer, provides support for companies working on AI and is developing Mojo.

A modern AI programming stack generally has Python on top, Lattner says, but because that is an inefficient language, it has C++ underneath to handle the implementation. The C++ then must communicate with performance accelerators or GPUs, so developers add a platform such as Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to make efficient use of those GPUs. "Mojo came from the need to unify these three different parts of the stack so that we could build a unified solution that can scale up and down," Lattner says. The result is a language with the same syntax as Python, so people used to programming in Python can adopt it with little difficulty, but which, by some measures, can run up to 35,000 times faster. For AI, Mojo is especially fast at performing the matrix multiplications used in many neural networks because it compiles the multiplication code to run directly on the GPU, bypassing CUDA...

"Increasingly, code is not being written by computer programmers. It's being written by doctors and journalists and chemists and gamers," says Jeremy Howard, an honorary professor of computer science at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a co-founder of fast.ai, a. "All data scientists write code, but very few data scientists would consider themselves professional computer programmers." Mojo attempts to fill that need by being a superset of Python. A program written in Python can be copied into Mojo and will immediately run faster, the company says. The speedup comes from a variety of factors. For instance, Mojo, like other modern languages, enables threads, small tasks that can be run simultaneously, rather than in sequence. Instead of using an interpreter to execute code as Python does, Mojo uses a compiler to turn the code into assembly language.

Mojo also gives developers the option of using static typing, which defines data elements and reduces the number of errors... "Static behavior is good because it leads to performance," Lattner says. "Static behavior is also good because it leads to more correctness and safety guarantees."
Python creator Guido van Rossum "says he is interested to watch how Mojo develops and whether it can hit the lofty goals Lattner is setting for it..." according to the article, " but he emphasizes that the language is in its early stages and, as of July 2023, Mojo had not yet been made available for download."


In June, Lattner did an hour-long interview with the TWIML AI podcast. And in 2017 Chris Lattner answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: JetBrains' Kotlin language, a Java rival endorsed by Google for Android mobile development, continues to scale up Tiobe's index of language popularity, reaching the 15th spot in the November 2023 rankings...

Software quality services company Tiobe cites Kotlin advantages including interoperability with Java and unrivaled Android accommodations as reasons for the language's rise. Kotlin, Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen said, also fits in with a modern programming culture of expressive languages that have a strong type system and avoid null pointer exceptions by design. "Based on my experience, I am pretty sure Kotlin can reach a top 10 position," Jansen said. It remains to be seen if it can ever scale as high as a top four slot, he added...

In the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming languages index this month, Kotlin was ranked 13th with a 1.76% share, having slipped slightly year-over-year.
Kotlin's rank on the TIOBE index rose three positions in the last month — after rising two positions the month before. TIOBE's CEO says the language has now achieved its highest ranking ever on the index, surpassing 2017's "first wave of Kotlin popularity...when Google announced first class support for Kotlin on Android."

Rust now ranks #20 on the index, behind Delphi/Object Pascal, Swift, Ruby, and R.

Here's TIOBE November rankings for top-20 most popular programming languages:

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. PHP
8. Visual Basic
9. SQL
10. Assembly Language
11. Scratch
12. Fortran
13. Go
14. MATLAB
15. Kotlin
16. Delphi/Object Pascal
17. Swift
18. Ruby
19. R
20. Rust

The Python community is staying busy.

• Three weeks ago a new podcast launched with Python core developer/steering council member Pablo Galindo and Python developer-in-residence Åukasz Langa.

• This month the Python Sofware Foundation announced its seventh Python Developers Survey.

• And for the fifth year in a row the foundation partnered with JetBrains to offer a 30% discount on JetBrains' dedicated Python Integrated Development Environment "PyCharm" — with all proceeds benefitting the Python Software Foundation ("The discount will be automatically applied when you check out. The promotion will only be available through November 27th...")
  
  A PSF blog post about the fundraiser notes you can also just make a direct donation to the Python Software Foundation, or sign up to become a foundation member to "help us sustain what we do."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: A joint project of Human Rights Watch and New York University to document human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been taken offline after exposing the identities of thousands of vulnerable people, including survivors of mass killings and sexual assaults. The Kivu Security Tracker is a "data-centric crisis map" of atrocities in eastern Congo that has been used by policymakers, academics, journalists, and activists to "better understand trends, causes of insecurity and serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law," according to the deactivated site. This includes massacres, murders, rapes, and violence against activists and medical personnel by state security forces and armed groups, the site said. But the KST's lax security protocols appear to have accidentally doxxed up to 8,000 people, including activists, sexual assault survivors, United Nations staff, Congolese government officials, local journalists, and victims of attacks, an Intercept analysis found. Hundreds of documents -- including 165 spreadsheets -- that were on a public server contained the names, locations, phone numbers, and organizational affiliations of those sources, as well as sensitive information about some 17,000 "security incidents," such as mass killings, torture, and attacks on peaceful protesters.

The data was available via KST's main website, and anyone with an internet connection could access it. The information appears to have been publicly available on the internet for more than four years. [...] The spreadsheets, along with the main KST website, were taken offline on October 28, after investigative journalist Robert Flummerfelt, one of the authors of this story, discovered the leak and informed Human Rights Watch and New York University's Center on International Cooperation. HRW subsequently assembled what one source close to the project described as a "crisis team." Last week, HRW and NYU's Congo Research Group, the entity within the Center on International Cooperation that maintains the KST website, issued a statement that announced the takedown and referred in vague terms to "a security vulnerability in its database," adding, "Our organizations are reviewing the security and privacy of our data and website, including how we gather and store information and our research methodology." The statement made no mention of publicly exposing the identities of sources who provided information on a confidential basis. [...] The Intercept has not found any instances of individuals affected by the security failures, but it's currently unknown if any of the thousands of people involved were harmed. "We deeply regret the security vulnerability in the KST database and share concerns about the wider security implications," Human Rights Watch's chief communications officer, Mei Fong, told The Intercept. Fong said in an email that the organization is "treating the data vulnerability in the KST database, and concerns around research methodology on the KST project, with the utmost seriousness." Fong added, "Human Rights Watch did not set up or manage the KST website. We are working with our partners to support an investigation to establish how many people -- other than the limited number we are so far aware of -- may have accessed the KST data, what risks this may pose to others, and next steps. The security and confidentiality of those affected is our primary concern."

Despite more than a decade of reminding, prodding, and downright nagging, a surprising number of developers still can't bring themselves to keep their code free of credentials that provide the keys to their kingdoms to anyone who takes the time to look for them. From a report: The lapse stems from immature coding practices in which developers embed cryptographic keys, security tokens, passwords, and other forms of credentials directly into the source code they write. The credentials make it easy for the underlying program to access databases or cloud services necessary for it to work as intended. [...]

The number of studies published since following the revelations underscored just how common the practice had been and remained in the years immediately following Uber's cautionary tale. Sadly, the negligence continues even now. Researchers from security firm GitGuardian this week reported finding almost 4,000 unique secrets stashed inside a total of 450,000 projects submitted to PyPI, the official code repository for the Python programming language. Nearly 3,000 projects contained at least one unique secret. Many secrets were leaked more than once, bringing the total number of exposed secrets to almost 57,000.

Programmer and writer James Somers, writing for New Yorker: Yes, our jobs as programmers involve many things besides literally writing code, such as coaching junior hires and designing systems at a high level. But coding has always been the root of it. Throughout my career, I have been interviewed and selected precisely for my ability to solve fiddly little programming puzzles. Suddenly, this ability was less important.

I had gathered as much from Ben (friend of the author), who kept telling me about the spectacular successes he'd been having with GPT-4. It turned out that it was not only good at the fiddly stuff but also had the qualities of a senior engineer: from a deep well of knowledge, it could suggest ways of approaching a problem. For one project, Ben had wired a small speaker and a red L.E.D. light bulb into the frame of a portrait of King Charles, the light standing in for the gem in his crown; the idea was that when you entered a message on an accompanying Web site the speaker would play a tune and the light would flash out the message in Morse code. (This was a gift for an eccentric British expat.) Programming the device to fetch new messages eluded Ben; it seemed to require specialized knowledge not just of the microcontroller he was using but of Firebase, the back-end server technology that stored the messages. Ben asked me for advice, and I mumbled a few possibilities; in truth, I wasn't sure that what he wanted would be possible. Then he asked GPT-4. It told Ben that Firebase had a capability that would make the project much simpler. Here it was -- and here was some code to use that would be compatible with the microcontroller.

Afraid to use GPT-4 myself -- and feeling somewhat unclean about the prospect of paying OpenAI twenty dollars a month for it -- I nonetheless started probing its capabilities, via Ben. We'd sit down to work on our crossword project, and I'd say, "Why don't you try prompting it this way?" He'd offer me the keyboard. "No, you drive," I'd say. Together, we developed a sense of what the A.I. could do. Ben, who had more experience with it than I did, seemed able to get more out of it in a stroke. As he later put it, his own neural network had begun to align with GPT-4's. I would have said that he had achieved mechanical sympathy. Once, in a feat I found particularly astonishing, he had the A.I. build him a Snake game, like the one on old Nokia phones. But then, after a brief exchange with GPT-4, he got it to modify the game so that when you lost it would show you how far you strayed from the most efficient route. It took the bot about ten seconds to achieve this. It was a task that, frankly, I was not sure I could do myself.

In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player's only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams, known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess. But the centaurs have arrived. GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing.

Started in 2013, "Hour of Code" is an annual tradition started by the education non-profit Code.org (which provides free coding lessons to schools). Its FAQ describes the December event for K-12 students as "a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities," and over 100 million schoolkids have participated over the years.

This year's theme will be "Creativity With AI," and the "computer vision" lesson includes a short video (less than 7 minutes) featuring a Tesla Autopilot product manager from its computer vision team. "I build self-driving cars," they say in the video. "Any place where there can be resources used more efficiently I think is a place where technology can play a role. But of course one of the best, impactful ways of AI, I hope, is through self-driving cars." (The video then goes on to explain how lots of training data ultimately generates a statistical model, "which is just a fancy way of saying, a guessing machine.")

The 7-minute video is part of a larger lesson plan (with a total estimated time of 45 minutes) in which students tackle a fun story problem. If a sports arena's scoreboard is showing digital numbers, what series of patterns would a machine-vision system have to recognize to identify each digit. (Students are asked to collaborate in groups.) And it's just one of seven 45-minute lessons, each one accompanied by a short video. (The longest video is 7 minutes and 28 seconds, and all seven videos, if watched back-to-back, would run for about 31 minutes.)

Not all the lessons involve actual coding, but the goal seems to be familiarizing students (starting at the 6th grade level) with artificial intelligence of today, and the issues it raises. The second-to-last lesson is titled "Algorithmic Bias" — with a video including interviews with an ethicist at Open AI and professor focused on AI from both MIT and Stanford. And the last lesson — "Our AI Code of Ethics" — challenges students to assemble documents and videos on AI-related "ethical pitfalls," and then pool their discoveries into an educational resource "for AI creators and legislators everywhere."

This year's installment is being billed as "the largest learning event in history." And it's scheduled for the week of December 4 so it coincides with "Computer Science Education Week" (a CS-education event launched in 2009 by the Association for Computing Machinery, with help from partners including Intel, Microsoft, Google, and the National Science Foundation).

The senior security editor at Ars Technica writes: Highly invasive malware targeting software developers is once again circulating in Trojanized code libraries, with the latest ones downloaded thousands of times in the last eight months, researchers said Wednesday.

Since January, eight separate developer tools have contained hidden payloads with various nefarious capabilities, security firm Checkmarx reported. The most recent one was released last month under the name "pyobfgood." Like the seven packages that preceded it, pyobfgood posed as a legitimate obfuscation tool that developers could use to deter reverse engineering and tampering with their code. Once executed, it installed a payload, giving the attacker almost complete control of the developerâ(TM)s machine. Capabilities include:


- Exfiltrate detailed host information
- Steal passwords from the Chrome web browser
- Set up a keylogger
- Download files from the victim's system
- Capture screenshots and record both screen and audio
- Render the computer inoperative by ramping up CPU usage, inserting a batch script in the startup directory to shut down the PC, or forcing a BSOD error with a Python script
- Encrypt files, potentially for ransom
- Deactivate Windows Defender and Task Manager
- Execute any command on the compromised host


In all, pyobfgood and the previous seven tools were installed 2,348 times. They targeted developers using the Python programming language... Downloads of the package came primarily from the US (62%), followed by China (12%) and Russia (6%)
Ars Technica concludes that "The never-ending stream of attacks should serve as a cautionary tale underscoring the importance of carefully scrutinizing a package before allowing it to run."

In Chrome, JavaScript (and WebAssembly) code are both executed by Google's open source V8 engine — which already has garbage-collecting capabilities. "This means developers making use of, for example, PHP compiled to Wasm, end up shipping a garbage collector implementation of the ported language (PHP) to the browser that already has a garbage collector," writes Google developer advocate Thomas Steiner, "which is as wasteful as it sounds."

"This is where WasmGC comes in." WebAssembly Garbage Collection (or WasmGC) is a proposal of the WebAssembly Community Group [which] adds struct and array heap types, which means support for non-linear memory allocation... In simplified terms, this means that with WasmGC, porting a programming language to WebAssembly means the programming language's garbage collector no longer needs to be part of the port, but instead the existing garbage collector can be used.
Sometime on Halloween, Steiner wrote that in Chrome, WebAssembly garbage collection is now enabled by default. But then he explored what this means for high-level programming languages (with their own built-in garbage collection) being compiled into WebAssembly: To verify the real-world impact of this improvement, Chrome's Wasm team has compiled versions of the Fannkuch benchmark (which allocates data structures as it works) from C, Rust, and Java. The C and Rust binaries could be anywhere from 6.1 K to 9.6 K depending on the various compiler flags, while the Java version is much smaller at only 2.3 K! C and Rust do not include a garbage collector, but they do still bundle malloc/free to manage memory, and the reason Java is smaller here is because it doesn't need to bundle any memory management code at all. This is just one specific example, but it shows that WasmGC binaries have the potential of being very small, and this is even before any significant work on optimizing for size.
The blog post includes two examples of WasmGC-ported programming languages in action:

• "One of the first programming languages that has been ported to Wasm thanks to WasmGC is Kotlin in the form of Kotlin/Wasm."

• "The Dart and Flutter teams at Google are also preparing support for WasmGC. The Dart-to-Wasm compilation work is almost complete, and the team is working on tooling support for delivering Flutter web applications compiled to WebAssembly."

This week GitHub announced the approaching general availability of the GPT-4-powered GitHub Copilot Chat in December "as part of your existing GitHub Copilot subscription" (and "available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects.")

And this "code-aware guidance and code generation" will also be integrated directly into github.com, "so developers can dig into code, pull requests, documentation, and general coding questions with Copilot Chat providing suggestions, summaries, analysis, and answers." With GitHub Copilot Chat we're enabling the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language for every developer on the planet. Whether it's finding an error, writing unit tests, or helping debug code, Copilot Chat is your AI companion through it all, allowing you to write and understand code using whatever language you speak...

Copilot Chat uses your code as context, and is able to explain complex concepts, suggest code based on your open files and windows, help detect security vulnerabilities, and help with finding and fixing errors in code, terminal, and debugger...

With the new inline Copilot Chat, developers can chat about specific lines of code, directly within the flow of their code and editor.
InfoWorld notes it will chat in "whatever language a developer speaks." (And that Copilot Chat will also be available in GitHub's mobile app.) But why wait until December? GitHub's blog post says that Copilot Chat "will come to the JetBrains suite of IDEs, available in preview today."

GitHub also plans to introduce "slash commands and context variables" for GitHub Copilot, "so fixing or improving code is as simple as entering /fix and generating tests now starts with /tests."

"With Copilot in the code editor, in the CLI, and now Copilot Chat on github.com and in our mobile app, we are making Copilot ubiquitous throughout the software development lifecycle and always available in all of GitHub's surface areas..."

CNBC adds that "Microsoft-owned GitHub" also plans to introduce "a more expensive Copilot assistant" in February "for developers inside companies that can explain and provide recommendations about internal source code."

Wednesday's blog post announcing these updates was written by GitHub's CEO, who seemed to be predicting an evolutionary leap into a new future. "Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot." He promised they'd built on their vision of a future "where AI infuses every step of the developer lifecycle." Open source and Git have fundamentally transformed how we build software. It is now evident that AI is ushering in the same sweeping change, and at an exponential pace... We are certain this foundational transformation of the GitHub platform, and categorically new way of software development, is necessary in a world dependent on software. Every day, the world's developers balance an unsustainable demand to both modernize the legacy code of yesterday and build our digital tomorrow. It is our guiding conviction to make it easier for developers to do it all, from the creative spark to the commit, pull request, code review, and deploy — and to do it all with GitHub Copilot deeply integrated into the developer experience.
And if you're worried about the security of AI-generated code... Today, GitHub Copilot applies an LLM-based vulnerability prevention system that blocks insecure coding patterns in real-time to make GitHub Copilot's suggestions more secure. Our model targets the most common vulnerable coding patterns, including hardcoded credentials, SQL injections, and path injections. GitHub Copilot Chat can also help identify security vulnerabilities in the IDE, explain the mechanics of a vulnerability with its natural language capabilities, and suggest a specific fix for the highlighted code.
But for Enterprise accounts paying for GitHub Advanced Security, there's also an upgrade coming: "new AI-powered application security testing features designed to detect and remediate vulnerabilities and secrets in your code." (It's already available in preview mode.)

GitHub even announced plans for a new AI assistant in 2024 that generates a step-by-step plan for responding to GitHub issues. (GitHub describes it as "like a pair programming session with a partner that knows about every inch of the project, and can follow your lead to make repository-wide changes from the issue to the pull request with the power of AI.")

CNBC notes that AI-powered coding assistants "are still nascent, though, with less than 10% enterprise adoption, according to Gartner, a technology industry research firm."

But last month Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts GitHub Copilot already had one million paying users...

And GitHub's blog post concludes, "And we're just getting started."

With programmers in high demand, InfoWorld asks if it's really worthwhile for software developers to pursue certifications? "Based on input from those in the field, company executives, and recruiters, the answer is a resounding yes," "The primary benefit of certifications is to verify your skill sets," says Archie Payne, president of the recruiting firm CalTek Staffing... Certifications can be used to "reinforce the experience on your resume or demonstrate competencies beyond what you've done in the workplace in a prior role." Certifications show that you are committed to your field, invested in career growth, and connected to the broader technology landscape, Payne says. "Obtaining certification indicates that you are interested in learning new skills and continuing your learning throughout your career," he says...

In cases where multiple candidates are equally qualified, having a relevant certification can give one candidate an edge over others, says Aleksa Krstic, CTO at Localizely, a provider of a cloud-based translation platform. "When it comes to certifications in general, when we see a junior to mid-level developer armed with programming certifications, it's a big green light for our hiring team," says MichaÅ Kierul, who is CEO of software company INTechHouse.

"It's not just about the knowledge they have gained," Kierul says. "It speaks volumes about their passion, their drive to excel, and their commitment to continuous learning outside their regular work domain. It underscores a key trait we highly value: the desire to grow, learn, and elevate oneself in the world of technology."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Android is slowly entering the RISC-V era. So far we've seen Google say it wants to give the up-and-coming CPU architecture "tier-1" support in Android, putting RISC-V on equal footing with Arm. Qualcomm has announced the first mass-market RISC-V Android chip, a still-untitled Snapdragon Wear chip for smartwatches. Now Google has announced a timeline for developer tools via the Google Open Source Blog. The last post is titled "Android and RISC-V: What you need to know to be ready."

Getting the Android OS and app ecosystem to support a new architecture is going to take an incredible amount of work from Google and developers, and these tools are laying the foundation for that work. First up, Google already has the "Cuttlefish" virtual device emulator running, including a gif of it booting up. This isn't the official "Android Emulator" -- which is targeted at app developers doing app development -- Cuttlefish is a hardware emulator for Android OS development. It's the same idea as the Android Emulator but for the bottom half of the tech stack -- the kernel, framework, and hardware bits. Cuttlefish lets Google and other Android OS contributors work on a RISC-V Android build without messing with an individual RISC-V device. Google says it's working well enough now that you can download and emulate a RISC-V device today, though the company warns that nothing is optimized yet.

The next step is getting the Android Emulator (for app developers) up and running, and Google says: "By 2024, the plan is to have emulators available publicly, with a full feature set to test applications for various device form factors!" The nice thing about Android is that most app code is written with no architecture in mind -- it's all just Java/Kotlin. So once the Android RunTime starts spitting out RISC-V code, a lot of app code should Just Work. That means most of the porting work will need to go into things written in the NDK, the native developer kit, like libraries and games. The emulator will still be great for testing, though.

"More developers are looking for or are open to a new job now compared to the last two years," writes Stack Overflow's senior analyst for market research and insights — citing the results of their latest survey of developers in 107 different countries.

"More than 1,000 developers responded to this year's survey about jobs and 79% are at least considering new opportunities if not actively looking." New insights from these survey results show that new tech talent and late-career developers are both more likely to be looking. New developers have increasingly switched jobs compared to early- and mid-career developers in the last three years... Interest in looking for a new job drops as developers get older for new to mid-career (44 and younger) respondents (86% to 74%), but picks back up for those 55 to 64 (88%). Late-career developers acknowledge curiosity about other companies as their second top reason to look for a new job this year behind "better salary," which all age groups rank as their top reason. Curiosity grew in importance for late-career developers since last year more than all other age groups (32% vs. 22%) and is more important to this group than reasons other groups ranked higher such as working with new technology and growth opportunities...

In our 2023 Developer Survey, we started asking about AI and the sentiment around it in our developer community; results were very similar when we checked in again through this pulse survey (70% are using AI or planning to). Developers may also feel less enthusiastic about learning opportunities now that AI tools are rapidly developing to help many be more productive in their jobs (30% cite this as the top benefit).
Other interesting findings from the survey:

• Compared to the 2023 Developer Survey, 8% of developers have exited the technology industry and are increasingly filling roles in manufacturing and supply chain companies (11% vs. 7%)

• Technology is the industry most developers currently work in (46%), followed by manufacturing/supply chain (14%) and financial services (13%)

• New tech talent is onboarding at as many jobs by 24 as those up to 10 years their senior and this rapid experience cycle could rival the knowledge and experience of those they report to.

Long-time Slashdot reader CJSHayward shares "an attempt at Python virtual shell."

The home-brewed project "mixes your native shell with Python with the goal of letting you use your regular shell but also use Python as effectively a shell scripting language, as an alternative to your shell's built-in scripting language... I invite you to explore and improve it!"

From the web site: The Python Virtual Shell (pvsh or 'p' on the command line) lets you mix zsh / bash / etc. built-in shell scripting with slightly modified Python scripting. It's kind of like Brython [a Python implementation for client-side web programming], but for the Linux / Unix / Mac command line...

The core concept is that all Python code is indented with tabs, with an extra tab at the beginning to mark Python code, and all shell commands (including some shell builtins) have zero tabs of indentation. They can be mixed line-by-line, offering an opportunity to use built-in zsh, bash, etc. scripting or Python scripting as desired.

The Python is an incomplete implementation; it doesn't support breaking a line into multiple lines. Nonetheless, this offers a tool to fuse shell- and Python-based interactions from the Linux / Unix / Mac command line.

theodp writes: The BBC reports that Pope Francis has endorsed a global project aimed at getting more children into computer programming. The Code with Pope initiative, championed by Cosmose AI founder Miron Mironiuk, aims to bridge "the glaring disparities in education" across the globe by providing access to Python coding education through the free online learning platform Codeforia for students aged 11-15 across Europe, Africa and Latin America. Mironiuk will meet the Pope at the Vatican, but he admits he's not anticipating the pontiff to emulate his students in acquiring new skills. "I don't expect him to know Python very well," he said.

This is not the first time the Pope has encouraged young people to get into coding, having helped write a line of code together with tech-backed nonprofit Code.org in 2019. Pope Francis has also blessed AI's potential for good, meeting with Microsoft President Brad Smith (a Code.org Board member) to sign the Rome Call for AI Ethics early this year just ahead of Microsoft's $10B OpenAI investment and announcing "Artificial Intelligence and Peace" as the theme for World Day of Peace 2024 in August.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: SiFive, one of the key companies in the RISC-V ecosystem, is undergoing a significant restructuring marked by extensive layoffs and apparently a shift in business focus, reports More Than Moore. The company is seemingly retracting from its pre-designed core offerings, which means it may focus on custom cores instead. Meanwhile, the move casts uncertainty over SiFive's future in general along with its contributions to the RISC-V.

RISC-V has become quite a popular choice for making miniature low-cost cores, but there are several companies who are working on higher-performance RISC-V-based offerings. SiFive is one of such companies offering ready-to-use designs and also making custom cores based on what customers need. But now, SiFive has laid off somewhere between 100 to over 300 employees from around 700 in mid-October. Most of these were engineers, along with some sales and product personnel. Meanwhile, the company's leaders, including CEO Patrick Little, are still there. SiFive issued the following statement to Tom's Hardware: "As we identify and focus on our greatest opportunities, SiFive is shifting to best meet our customers' fast-changing requirements by undergoing a strategic refocusing of all our global teams. Unfortunately, with this realignment, approximately 20% of employees across all different business groups and levels were impacted. The employees are receiving severance and outplacement assistance.

SiFive continues to be excited about the long-term opportunities for the company and for RISC-V. The growth of the company has never been stronger and the opportunities never better. We are well funded for years in the future and continue to work with the market leaders in every segment. We remain focused on our four product groups, essential, intelligence, performance and automotive, and as we explained in a press event earlier this month, have a robust roadmap to meet the needs of these markets. We see tremendous new opportunities in AI and with Consumer products like wearables and mobile as Google brings Android to the RISC-V ecosystem. We will continue to offer customization for specific customers, offering standard and custom products where it makes sense from a business standpoint."