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Programming

Knowing C++ Beyond a Beginner Level 345

Posted by samzenpus from the level-up dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes: C++ is not an easy language to master, but many people are able to work in it just fine without being a 'guru' or anything along those lines. That being said, what separates C++ beginners from those with 'intermediate' skills, or even masters? According to this Dice article, it comes down to knowledge of several things, including copy constructors, virtual functions, how to handle memory leaks, the intricacies of casting, Lambda functions for C++11, (safe) exception handling and much more. All that being said, is there one particular thing or point that separates learners from masters?
Programming

MEAN Vs. LAMP: Finding the Right Fit For Your Next Project 175

Posted by samzenpus from the best-tools-for-the-job dept.
snydeq writes: LAMP diehards take note: The flexible simplicity of MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, and Node.js is no joke and could very well be a worthwhile stack for your next programming project, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner. "It was only a few years ago that MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js were raising eyebrows on their own. Now they've grown up and ganged up, and together they're doing serious work, poaching no small number of developers from the vast LAMP camp. But how exactly does this newfangled MEAN thing stack up against LAMP? When is it better to choose the well-tested, mature LAMP over this upstart collection of JavaScript-centric technologies?"
Cloud

Docker and CoreOS Join Together For Open Container Project At Linux Foundation 48

Posted by samzenpus from the working-together dept.
darthcamaro writes: The great schism in the container world is now at an end. Today, Docker and CoreOS, announced along with Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Cisco, EMC, Fujitsu, Goldman Sachs, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, the Linux Foundation, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Pivotal, Rancher Labs, Red Hat and VMware the Open Container Project, as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. The new effort will focus specifically on libcontainer — providing a baseline for a container runtime. "By participating with Docker and all the other folks in the OCP, we're getting the best of all worlds," Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS told eWEEK. "We're getting the contributions from Docker with the format and runtime that underpin container usage, and then we're also getting the shared standard and vendor neutrality aspects that we've designed with app container."
Linux Business

CRYENGINE Finally Lands On Linux 57

Posted by Soulskill from the welcome-to-crytux dept.
An anonymous reader writes: CRYENGINE, the video game engine from Crytek, will run natively on Linux starting from version 3.8.1. Other improvements include the ability to run on the Oculus Rift, support for OpenGL, 8-weight GPU vertex skinning, and improved POM self-shadowing. Here are the full release notes. They've also added Game Zero, a full blown example game that demonstrates how various features of the engine can work.
Programming

Ask Slashdot: Best Setups For Navigating a Programming-Focused MOOC? 39

Posted by timothy from the vending-machine-centric dept.
theodp writes: As one works his or her way through EdX's free The Analytics Edge, one finds oneself going back-and-forth between videos and R to complete the programming exercises associated with the lectures. While this can certainly be done on a cheap-o 13" laptop with a 6mbps connection by jumping around from the web-based videos to the client-based programming environment and to the web for help (god bless Stack Overflow), have you found (or do you dream of) a better setup for the MOOC programming courses offered by the likes of EdX, Udacity, and Coursera? Are you using multiple screens, split screens, touch screens, laptops/desktops/tablets, speakers, headphones, higher-speed connections? Anything else? Do you rely solely on the class materials and web-based resources, or do you purchase complementary books? Any thoughts on how to make the experience work best for those learning at home, in a classroom setting, on the road for business/travel, or during lengthy train commutes? Do you playback videos at faster speeds (e.g., 1.5x)? Any other tips?
Software

Unicode Consortium Releases Unicode 8.0.0 164

Posted by timothy from the hobo-symbols-and-the-black-tongue-of-mordor dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The newest version of the Unicode standard adds 7,716 new characters to the existing 21,499 – that's more than 35% growth! Most of them are Chinese, Japan and Korean ideographs, but among those changes Unicode adds support for new languages like Ik, used in Uganda.
Programming

Ask Slashdot: Best API Management System? 50

Posted by Soulskill from the notepad-and-lots-of-coffee dept.
An anonymous reader writes: I've landed a summer internship with a software firm that has a library of APIs available to current and potential customers. One of my team's tasks is to make recommendations on how to improve the developer portal, which not only provides a testing sandbox and documentation, but is also a source of sales leads for the company's business units. Mashery was the original choice for this task, but there are some limitations: some types of customers don't need to see all of the API in the library, and different business units have different goals for this developer platform when it comes to sales and marketing. What solutions work best to provide scaleable, customizable access?
Programming

Ask Slashdot: What's the Harm In a Default Setting For Div By Zero? 1067

Posted by timothy from the as-long-as-it's-a-big-zero dept.
New submitter CodeInspired writes: After 20 years of programming, I've decided I'm tired of checking for div by zero. Would there be any serious harm in allowing a system wide setting that said div by zero simply equals zero? Maybe it exists already, not sure. But I run into it all the time in every language I've worked with. Does anyone want their div by zero errors to result in anything other than zero?
Programming

WebAssembly: An Attempt To Give the Web Its Own Bytecode 126

Posted by timothy from the where-is-your-bottleneck dept.
New submitter Josiah Daniels writes with this kernel from a much more detailed article at Ars Technica about what already looks like a very important initiative: WebAssembly is a new project being worked on by people from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, to produce a bytecode for the Web. WebAssembly, or wasm for short, is intended to be a portable bytecode that will be efficient for browsers to download and load, providing a more efficient target for compilers than plain JavaScript or even asm.js
Microsoft

Is Microsoft's .NET Ecosystem On the Decline? 250

Posted by timothy from the are-you-caught-in-it? dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes: In a posting that recently attracted some buzz online, .NET developer Justin Angel (a former program manager for Silverlight) argued that the .NET ecosystem is headed for collapse—and that could take interest in C# along with it. "Sure, you'll always be able to find a job working in C# (like you would with COBOL), but you'll miss out on customer reach and risk falling behind the technology curve," he wrote. But is C# really on the decline? According to Dice's data, the popularity of C# has risen over the past several years; it ranks No. 26 on Dice's ranking of most-searched terms. But Angel claims he pulled data from Indeed.com that shows job trends for C# on the decline. Data from the TIOBE developer interest index mirrors that trend, he said, with "C# developer interest down approximately 60% down back to 2006-2008 levels." Is the .NET ecosystem really headed for long-term implosion, thanks in large part to developers devoting their energies to other platforms such as iOS and Android?
Programming

ECMAScript 6 Is Officially a JavaScript Standard 80

Posted by timothy from the very-long-initiation-process dept.
rjmarvin writes: The ECMAScript 6 specification is now a standard. ES6 is the first major revision to the programming language since 1999 and its hallmark features include a revamped syntax featuring classes and modules. The Ecma General Assembly officially approved the specification at its June meeting in France, ECMAScript project editor Allen Wirfs-Brock announced.
Open Source

Reasons To Use Mono For Linux Development 355

Posted by samzenpus from the best-tools-for-the-job dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes: In the eleven years since Mono first appeared, the Linux community has regarded it with suspicion. Because Mono is basically a free, open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, some developers feared that Microsoft would eventually launch a patent war that could harm many in the open-source community. But there are some good reasons for using Mono, developer David Bolton argues in a new blog posting. Chief among them is MonoDevelop, which he claims is an excellent IDE; it's cross-platform abilities; and its utility as a game-development platform. That might not ease everybody's concerns (and some people really don't like how Xamarin has basically commercialized Mono as an iOS/Android development platform), but it's maybe enough for some people to take another look at the platform.
The Almighty Buck

GitHub Seeks Funding At $2 Billion Valuation 80

Posted by Soulskill from the accepting-pull-requests-from-the-bank dept.
itwbennett writes: GitHub, the most popular Git hosting site, is reportedly seeking $200 million in an upcoming private funding round that values the company as high as $2 billion. "GitHub is an interesting company," said analyst Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics. "It is partly a hosting service for developers and partly a social media site." And it's a great place to recruit developers. But company-specific factors aside, there's also a lot of money in the market "looking for homes," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group.
Bug

Unreal Engine Code Issues Fixed By Third-party Company 72

Posted by Soulskill from the bugging-out dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Unreal Engine is the famous game engine that was used to implement such games as Unreal Tournament, BioShock Infinite, Mass Effect and many more. On March 19, 2014 Unreal Engine 4 was made publicly available from a GitHub repository. It was a big event for the game development industry. One of the companies that took an interest in this was PVS-Studio, who created a static C/C++ code analyzer. They analyzed the Unreal Engine source code and reported to Epic Games's development team about the problems they found. Epic suggested a partnership with PVS-Studio to fix those bugs, and their challenge was accepted. Now, PVS-Studio shares their experience in fixing code issues and merging corrected code with new updates in a major project that shares its source code.
Open Source

Linus Torvalds Says Linux Can Move On Without Him 323

Posted by timothy from the but-he-should-still-drive-carefully dept.
pacopico writes: In a typically blunt interview, Linus Torvalds has said for the first time that if he were to die, Linux could safely continue on its own. Bloomberg has the report, which includes a video with Torvalds at his home office. Torvalds insists that people like Greg Kroah-Hartman have taken over huge parts of the day-to-day work maintaining Linux and that they've built up enough trust to be respected. This all comes as Torvalds has been irking more and more people with his aggressive attitude. The line between "blunt" and "aggressive" is one that you probably get to skirt a lot, when you (in the words of the Bloomberg reporter) "may be the most influential individual economic force of the past 20 years."
Security

Report: Aging Java Components To Blame For Massively Buggy Open-Source Software 130

Posted by timothy from the bit-rot-multiplier-applies-here-too dept.
itwbennett writes: The problem isn't new, but a report released Tuesday by Sonatype, the company that manages one of the largest repositories of open-source Java components, sheds some light on poor inventory practices that are all-too-common in software development. To wit: 'Sonatype has determined that over 6 percent of the download requests from the Central Repository in 2014 were for component versions that included known vulnerabilities and the company's review of over 1,500 applications showed that by the time they were developed and released each of them had an average of 24 severe or critical flaws inherited from their components.'
Social Networks

Facebook Has a New Private Mobile Photo-Sharing App, and They Built It In C++ 173

Posted by timothy from the fortran-was-busy dept.
jfruh writes: Facebook [on Monday] announced Moments, a new mobile app that uses Facebook's facial recognition technology to let you sync up photos only with friends who are in those photos with you. Somewhat unusually for a new app, the bulk of it is built in the venerable C++ language, which turned out to be easier for building a cross-platform mobile app than other more "modern" languages.
Operating Systems

Ask Slashdot: A Development Environment Still Usable In 25 Years Time? 257

Posted by Soulskill from the not-just-for-space-shuttles-anymore dept.
pev writes: I'm working on an embedded project that will need to be maintainable for the next 25 years. This raises the interesting question of how this can be best supported. The obvious solution seems to be to use a VM that has a portable disk image that can be moved to any emulators in the future (the build environment is currently based around Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / x86_64) but how do you predict what vendors / hardware will be available in 25 years? Is anyone currently supporting software of a similar age that can share lessons learned from experience? Where do you choose to draw the line between handling likely issues and making things overly complicated?
Open Source

Open Source JavaScript Library Released For Accessibility Testing 21

Posted by Soulskill from the in-body-spray-form dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Deque Systems, a company which focuses on web accessibility, has just released aXe (The Accessibility Engine). aXe is an open-source JavaScript library consisting of accessibility testing rules which can be integrated into any testing framework that supports JavaScript execution. The intent behind aXe is to allow developers testing their products for accessibility compliance to easily integrate a common set of rules into their workflow. The goal is to standardize both automated accessibility testing and test results, and to make incorporating accessibility testing and compliance into web-based products easier for developers. The source code is available on GitHub.
Education

The Danger of Picking a Major Based On Where the Jobs Are 306

Posted by timothy from the talent-moves dept.
theodp writes: In his new book Will College Pay Off?, Wharton professor Peter Cappelli argues that banking on a specialized degree's usefulness is risky, especially since one reason some jobs are in high demand is that no one predicted that they would be. "A few generations ago," notes Cappelli, "the employers used to look for smart or adaptable kids on college campuses with general skills. They would convert them to what they wanted inside the company and they would retrain them and they'd get different skills. They're not doing that now. They're just expecting that the kids will show up with the skills that the employer needs when the employer needs them. That's a pretty difficult thing to expect, because of these kinds of problems. So the employers now are always complaining that they can't get the people they need, but it's pretty obvious why that's not happening." On CS-as-a-major, Cappelli says, "If you look at most of the people who are in computer programming, for example, they have no IT degree-they just learned how to program. Maybe they had a couple of courses in it, maybe they were self-taught. In Silicon Valley, the industry was built with only 10 percent of the workforce having IT degrees. You can do most of these jobs with a variety of different skills. I think what's happening now is that people have come to think that you need these degrees in order to do the jobs, which is not really true. Maybe what these degrees do for you is they shorten the job training by a bit, but that's about it. And you lose a bunch of other things along the way." One wonders what Cappelli might think of San Francisco's recent decision to pick a preschool curriculum based on where today's tech jobs are, echoing President Obama's tech industry-nurtured belief that "what you want to do is introduce this [coding] with the ABCs and the colors."

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