Programming

Google-Advised Disney Cartoon Aims To Convince Preschool Girls Coding's Cool 254

Posted by Soulskill from the chocolate-frosted-logic-bombs dept.
theodp writes: Cereal and fast food companies found cartoons an effective way to market to children. Google is apparently hoping to find the same, as it teams with Disney Junior on a cartoon to help solve its computer science "pipeline" problem. The LA Times reports the tech giant worked with the children's channel on the new animated preschool series Miles From Tomorrowland, in an effort to get kids — particularly girls — interested in computer science. The program, which premieres Friday, introduces the preschool crowd to Miles Callisto, a young space adventurer, and his family — big sister (and coder extraordinaire) Loretta and their scientist parents Phoebe and Leo. Google engineers served as consultants (YouTube video) on the show. "When we did our computer science research, we found the No. 2 reason why girls in particular are not pursuing it as a career is because their perception was fairly negative and they associated it as a field for boys," said Julie Ann Crommett, Google's program manager for computer science in media. Can't wait for the episode where Google and Disney conspire to suppress Loretta's wages!
Facebook

Facebook Brings React Native To Native Mobile Development 78

Posted by timothy from the reflex-hammer-writ-lare dept.
the_insult_dog writes Despite a lack of dev tools, samples, tutorials, documentation or even a blog post or press release, Facebook's announcement that it's bringing the popular React.js JavaScript library to iOS and Android native mobile development stirred up comments like "groundbreaking" and "game changing." In a series of videos from the recent React.js Conference 2015, Facebook engineers said they're rejecting the "write-once, run-anywhere pipe dream" in favor of a "learn-once, write-anywhere" paradigm. All efforts to duplicate native performance and look-and-feel actually feel like "s__t", an engineer said in explaining the company's new approach to native development in a conference keynote video. Yet to be proven, with tools in the works, it's supposedly a huge success internally at Facebook and experts said the new approach could shake up the whole mobile dev industry.
Programming

Ask Slashdot: What Tools To Clean Up a Large C/C++ Project? 233

Posted by timothy from the windex-is-a-start dept.
An anonymous reader writes I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to clean up a relatively large C/C++ project. We are talking ~200 files, 11MB of source code, 220K lines of code. A superficial glance shows that there are a lot of functions that seem to be doing the same things, a lot of 'unused' stuff, and a lot of inconsistency between what is declared in .h files and what is implemented in the corresponding .cpp files. Are there any tools that will help me catalog this mess and make it easier for me to locate/erase unused things, clean up .h files, and find functions with similar names?
Education

Washington May Count CS As Foreign Language For College Admission 259

Posted by timothy from the alle-menschen-sind-auslaender dept.
theodp writes On Wednesday, Washington State held a public hearing on House Bill 1445, which proposes a study "to allow two years of computer sciences to count as two years of world languages for the purposes of admission into a four-year institution of higher education." Among the questions posed by the House Higher Education Committee to a UW rep at the hearing was the following: "What's the case for...not just world language is good, world language is well-rounded, but world language is so super-duper-duper good that you should spend two years of your life doing them and specifically better than something else like coding?" The promise of programming jobs, promoted by Microsoft execs and other MS folks like ex-Program Manager Audrey Sniezek (ironically laid off last summer), has prompted Kentucky to ponder a similar measure.
Hardware Hacking

You Can Now Clone Samsung's Gear VR and Test Your Virtual Reality Apps 32

Posted by samzenpus from the more-real-than-real dept.
An anonymous reader writes While Samsung's Gear VR headset launched in early December in the U.S., folks abroad didn't have any official means of buying the headset to test their in-development applications. Only recently has Gear VR begun making its way to countries around the world, and it's doing so slowly. For developers who don't want to wait (or DIYers who don't want to buy), some smart folks have figured out how to emulate the headset using a development board with an IMU that's been flashed with the same firmware found on the Oculus Rift DK1 headset. Plugging the board into the Note 4 (the smartphone that powers Gear VR), results in the phone recognizing the IMU as the Gear VR headset, allowing developers to test their applications and even launch the "Oculus Home" environment, allowing access to official applications and content.
Programming

JavaScript, PHP Top Most Popular Languages, With Apple's Swift Rising Fast 192

Posted by samzenpus from the king-of-the-hill dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes Developers assume that Swift, Apple's newish programming language for iOS and Mac OS X apps, will become extremely popular over the next few years. According to new data from RedMonk, a tech-industry analyst firm, Swift could reach that apex of popularity sooner rather than later. While the usual stalwarts—including JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, C#, C++, and Ruby—top RedMonk's list of the most-used languages, Swift has, well, swiftly ascended 46 spots in the six months since the firm's last update, from 68th to 22nd. RedMonk pulls data from GitHub and Stack Overflow to create its rankings, due to those sites' respective sizes and the public nature of their data. While its top-ranked languages don't trade positions much between reports, there's a fair amount of churn at the lower end of the rankings. Among those "smaller" languages, R has enjoyed stable popularity over the past six months, Rust and Julia continue to climb, and Go has exploded upwards—although CoffeeScript, often cited as a language to watch, has seen its support crumble a bit.
Businesses

Study Predicts 9% Drop In Salaries of New CS Grads This Year 170

Posted by Soulskill from the gotta-keep-that-stem-shortage-looking-short dept.
Jim_Austin writes: The first report on the class of 2015 from the respected National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which conducts surveys of employers' hiring intentions throughout the year, projects a 9% drop in the salaries of new computer science bachelor's degree graduates, from $67,300 in 2014 to $61,287 this year. Reader phantomfive sends this news on a related subject: The Brookings Institute has released a report showing where the tech jobs are in the United States. Of course, San Jose comes in first, but Kansas is high up in the list. Michigan and Utah also were surprisingly high. On the other hand, if you live in Minnesota and you think there are no tech jobs, you are probably right.
Books

Book Review: Core HTML5 2D Game Programming 50

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
eldavojohn writes Core HTML5 2D Game Programming details a journey through creating Snail Bait in well defined steps. This simple two dimensional platform game works as a great starting point for anyone interested in making their very first game targeting many desktop and mobile platforms. This incremental process is expertly segmented into logical lessons with the only prerequisite being fluency in JavaScript. One of the most attractive aspects of this book is that the core concepts of this book don't rely on some flavor of the week JavaScript library or framework. Read below for the rest of eldavojohn's review.
Businesses

Building a Good Engineering Team In a Competitive Market 101

Posted by samzenpus from the putting-a-team-together dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes It's a pretty good market out there for tech professionals, at least on a statistical level. That can make it difficult for companies (both large ones and startups) to find good talent for their developer and engineering ranks. According to Ron Pragides, who rode the wave of IPOs at Salesforce and Twitter before joining Bigcommerce, the trick to hiring good tech people isn't necessarily a matter of offering the best perks, or the most money, or even an office with all sorts of fun stuff (although those can help). Instead, it's often a matter of selling them on a vision of the company's future. "It is about presenting the opportunity and the potential of what it could be if we have the right attitude, the right focus, the right work ethic," he said in an interview, "It's about making people feel like this is your company and making them understand they are going to help the culture and will have a big direction in how the office develops. I tell them, 'This is your company, this is your startup.'" But even that might not be enough in places like Silicon Valley, where lots of companies offer that "vision thing." So what does it take to pull in good people to work on your projects? Or does it really just come down to money in the end?
Education

WA Bill Takes Aim at Boys' Dominance In Computer Classes 779

Posted by samzenpus from the all-things-equal dept.
theodp writes Boys' over-representation in K-12 computer classes has perplexed educators for 30+ years. Now, following on the heels of Code.org's and Google's attempts to change the game with boys-don't-count gender-based CS teacher funding schemes, Washington State lawmakers have introduced House Bill 1813, legislation that requires schools seeking K-12 computer education funding to commit to preventing boys from ruling the computer class roost. Computer science and education grant recipients, HB 1813 explains, "must demonstrate engaged and committed leadership in support of introducing historically underrepresented students [including girls, low-income students, and minority students]" and "demonstrate a plan to engage historically underrepresented students with computer science." Calling it "a bold new bill that we hope more states will follow," corporate and tech billionaire-backed Code.org tweeted its support for the bill.
Programming

MIT Randomizes Tasks To Speed Massive Multicore Processors 63

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
itwbennett writes Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a data structure that they claim can help large multicore processors churn through their workloads more effectively. Their trick? Do away with the traditional first-come, first-served work queue and assign tasks more randomly. The SprayList algorithm allows processors with many cores to spread out their work so they don't stumble over one another, creating bottlenecks that hamper performance.
Open Source

Perl 6 In Time For Next Christmas? 192

Posted by samzenpus from the soon-to-come dept.
An anonymous reader writes Larry Wall has reportedly announced at Fosdem that "Perl 6 Developers will attempt to make a development release of Version 1.0 of Perl 6.0 in time for his 61st Birthday this year and a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015." From the article: "There is going to be the inevitable discussions, comments and probably some mileage from detractors to come. However ever were it so, for us in the Perl Community these are quite exciting times. We have two strong languages and a strong community, I think there is a lot that binds us together so here's looking forward to Christmas."
Programming

How Blind Programmers Write Code 79

Posted by Soulskill from the one-line-at-a-time dept.
theodp writes: Yes, folks, there are blind programmers. There's Ed Summers, for one, who lost his vision at age 30 and now ghostblogs for Willie the Seeing Eye Dog. And if you've ever wondered how the blind can code, Florian Beijers, who has been blind since birth, explains that all he needs is a normal Dell Inspiron 15r SE notebook and his trusty open source NVDA screen reader software, and he's good-to-go. "This is really all the adaptation a blind computer user needs," Beijers adds, but he does ask one small favor: "If you're writing the next big application, with a stunning UI and a great workflow, I humbly ask you to consider accessibility as part of the equation. In this day and age, there's really no reason not to use the UI toolkits available."
The Military

US Army Releases Code For Internal Forensics Framework 37

Posted by Soulskill from the see-what-kind-of-code-your-tax-dollars-can-buy dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Maryland has released on GitHub a version of a Python-based internal forensics tool which the army itself has been using for five years. Dshell is a Linux-based framework designed to help investigators identify and examine compromised IT environments. One of the intentions of the open-sourcing of the project is to involve community developers in the creation of new modules for the framework. The official release indicates that the version of Dshell released to Github is not necessarily the same one that the Army uses, or at least that the module package might be pared down from the Army-issued software.
Oracle

VirtualBox Development At a Standstill 288

Posted by Soulskill from the not-with-a-virtual-bang,-but-a-virtual-whimper dept.
jones_supa writes: Phoronix notes how it has been a long time since last hearing of any major innovations or improvements to VirtualBox, the virtual machine software managed by Oracle. This comes while VMware is improving its products on all platforms, and KVM, Xen, Virt-Manager, and related Linux virtualization technologies continue to advance as well. Is there any hope left for a revitalized VirtualBox? It has been said that there are only four paid developers left on the VirtualBox team at the company, which is not enough manpower to significantly advance such a complex piece of software. The v4.3 series has been receiving some maintenance updates during the last two years, but that's about it.
Businesses

One In Five Developers Now Works On IoT Projects 252

Posted by samzenpus from the that's-a-whole-lot-of-things dept.
dcblogs writes Evans Data Corp., which provides research and intelligence for the software development industry, said that of the estimated 19 million developers worldwide, 19% are now doing IoT-related work. A year ago, the first year IoT-specific data was collected, that figure was 17%. But when developers were asked whether they plan to work in IoT development over the next year, 44% of the respondents said they are planning to do so, said Michael Rasalan, director of research at Evans.
Programming

Anonymous No More: Your Coding Style Can Give You Away 220

Posted by samzenpus from the leaving-your-mark dept.
itwbennett writes Researchers from Drexel University, the University of Maryland, the University of Goettingen, and Princeton have developed a "code stylometry" that uses natural language processing and machine learning to determine the authors of source code based on coding style. To test how well their code stylometry works, the researchers gathered publicly available data from Google's Code Jam, an annual programming competition that attracts a wide range of programmers, from students to professionals to hobbyists. Looking at data from 250 coders over multiple years, averaging 630 lines of code per author their code stylometry achieved 95% accuracy in identifying the author of anonymous code (PDF). Using a dataset with fewer programmers (30) but more lines of code per person (1,900), the identification accuracy rate reached 97%.
Programming

The American App Economy Is Now "Bigger Than Hollywood" 135

Posted by samzenpus from the there's-an-app-for-that dept.
Lemeowski writes Technology business analyst Horace Deidu found an interesting nugget while closely examining an Apple press release from earlier this year: "The iOS App Store distributed $10 billion to developers in 2014, which, Deidu points out, is just about as much as Hollywood earned off U.S. box office revenues the same year." That means the American app industry is poised to eclipse the American film industry. Additionally, Apple says its App Store has created 627,000 jobs, which Deidu contrasts with the 374,000 jobs Hollywood creates
Open Source

Computer Chess Created In 487 Bytes, Breaks 32-Year-Old Record 204

Posted by Soulskill from the go-small-or-go-home dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The record for smallest computer implementation of chess on any platform was held by 1K ZX Chess, which saw a release back in 1983 for the Sinclair ZX81. It uses just 672 bytes of memory, and includes most chess rules as well as a computer component to play against. The 32-year-old record has been beaten this week by the demoscene group Red Sector Inc. They have implemented a fully-playable version of chess called BootChess in just 487 bytes (readme file including source code).
Programming

Ask Slashdot: What Makes a Great Software Developer? 214

Posted by Soulskill from the highlander-style-combat dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes: What does it take to become a great — or even just a good — software developer? According to developer Michael O. Church's posting on Quora (later posted on LifeHacker), it's a long list: great developers are unafraid to learn on the job, manage their careers aggressively, know the politics of software development (which he refers to as 'CS666'), avoid long days when feasible, and can tell fads from technologies that actually endure... and those are just a few of his points. Over at Salsita Software's corporate blog, meanwhile, CEO and founder Matthew Gertner boils it all down to a single point: experienced programmers and developers know when to slow down. What do you think separates the great developers from the not-so-fantastic ones?

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