"Stack Overflow is adding artificial intelligence to its offerings," reports ZDNet (which notes traffic to the Q&A site has dropped 5% in the last year).

So in a video, Stack Overflow's CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says that search and question-asking "will evolve to provide you with instant summarized solutions with citations to sources, aggregated by generative AI — plus the option to ask follow-up questions in a chat-like format."

The New Stack provides some context: As computer scientist Santiago Valdarrama remarked in a tweet, "I don't remember the last time I visited Stack Overflow. Why would I when tools like Copilot and ChatGPT answer my questions faster without making me feel bad for asking?" It's a problem Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar acknowledges because, well, he encountered it too.

"When I first started using Stack Overflow, I remember my first experience was quite harsh, because I basically asked a fairly simple question, but the standard on the website is pretty high," Chandrasekar told The New Stack. "When ChatGPT came out, it was a lot easier for people to go and ask ChatGPT without anybody watching...."

But what may be of more interest to developers is that Stack Overflow is now offering an IDE (integrated development environment) extension for Visual Studio Code that will be powered by OverflowAI. This means that coders will be able to ask a conversational interface a question and find solutions from within the IDE.

Stack Overflow also is launching a GenAI Stack Exchange, where the community can post and share knowledge on prompt engineering, getting the most out of AI and similar topics.
And they're integrating it into other workflows as well. "Of course, AI isn't replacing humans any time soon," CEO Chandrasekar says in the video. "But it can help you draft a question to pose to our community..."

Signups for the OverflowAI preview are available now. "With your help, we'll be putting AI to work," CEO Chandrasekar says in the video.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register: ChatGPT, OpenAI's fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a [pre-print] study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants.

The Purdue team analyzed ChatGPT's answers to 517 Stack Overflow questions to assess the correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and conciseness of ChatGPT's answers. The U.S. academics also conducted linguistic and sentiment analysis of the answers, and questioned a dozen volunteer participants on the results generated by the model. "Our analysis shows that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers are incorrect and 77 percent are verbose," the team's paper concluded. "Nonetheless, ChatGPT answers are still preferred 39.34 percent of the time due to their comprehensiveness and well-articulated language style." Among the set of preferred ChatGPT answers, 77 percent were wrong...

"During our study, we observed that only when the error in the ChatGPT answer is obvious, users can identify the error," their paper stated. "However, when the error is not readily verifiable or requires external IDE or documentation, users often fail to identify the incorrectness or underestimate the degree of error in the answer." Even when the answer has a glaring error, the paper stated, two out of the 12 participants still marked the response preferred. The paper attributes this to ChatGPT's pleasant, authoritative style.

"From semi-structured interviews, it is apparent that polite language, articulated and text-book style answers, comprehensiveness, and affiliation in answers make completely wrong answers seem correct," the paper explained.

In a groundbreaking move, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE have come together to announce the formation of the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA). From a report: The goal of this new collaborative trade association is to foster "the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free enterprise Linux source code."

The inception of OpenELA is a direct response to Red Hat's recent alterations to RHEL source code availability. This new Delaware 501(c)(6) US nonprofit association will provide an open process for organizations to access source code. This will enable it to build RHEL-compatible distributions. The initiative underscores the importance of community-driven source code, which serves as a foundation for creating compatible distributions.

Mike McGrath, Red Hat's vice president of Red Hat Core Platforms, sparked this when he announced Red Hat would be changing how users can access RHEL's source code. For the non-Hatters among you, Core Platforms is the division in charge of RHEL. McGrath wrote, "CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal."

This made it much more difficult for RHEL clone vendors, such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux, to create perfect RHEL variant distributions. AlmaLinux elected to try to work with Red Hat's new source code rules. Oracle restarted its old fighting ways with IBM/Red Hat; SUSE announced an RHEL-compatible distro fork plan; and Rocky Linux found new ways to obtain RHEL code. Now the last two, along with CIQ, which started Rocky Linux, have joined forces.

Canonical engineering manager Ben Hoyt believes that a variable's name is more important than its type, so "the name should be more prominent and come first in declarations." In many popular programming languages, including C, C++, Java, and C#, when you define a field or variable, you write the type before the name. For example (in C++):

// Struct definition
struct person {
std::string name;
std::string email;
int age;
};

In other languages, including Go, Rust, TypeScript, and Python (with type hints), you write the name before the type. For example (in Go):

// Struct definition
type Person struct {
Name string
Email string
Age int
}

There's a nice answer in the Go FAQ about why Go chose this order: "Why are declarations backwards?". It starts with "they're only backwards if you're used to C", which is a good point — name-before-type has a long history in languages like Pascal. In fact, Go's type declaration syntax (and packages) were directly inspired by Pascal.

The FAQ goes on to point out that parsing is simpler with name-before-type, and declaring multiple variables is less error-prone than in C. In C, the following declares x to be a pointer, but (surprisingly at first!) y to be a normal integer:

int* x, y;

Whereas the equivalent in Go does what you'd expect, declaring both to be pointers:

var x, y *int

The Go blog even has an in-depth article by Rob Pike on Go's Declaration Syntax, which describes more of the advantages of Go's syntax over C's, particularly with arrays and function pointers.

Oddly, the article only hints at what I think is the more important reason to prefer name-before-type for everyday programming: it's clearer.
Hoyt argues a variable's name has more meaning (semantically) — pointing out dynamically-typed languages like Python and Ruby don't even need types, and that languages like Java, Go, C++ and C# now include type inference.

"I think the takeaway is this: we can't change the past, but if you're creating a new language, please put names before types!"

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The necessity of multiple drafts may be an idea that's drilled into children's minds by teachers and parents, but in 2023 there's still a need to remind software engineers to Throw Away Your First Draft of Your Code. "The next time you start on a major project," advises Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya, "I want you to write code for a couple of days and then delete it all. Just throw it away. I'm serious. And you should probably have some of your best engineers doing this throwaway work. It's going to save you time in the long run."

While Tietz-Sokolskaya's advice echoes that of Ernest Hemingway ("the first draft of anything is shit"), do developers tend to scrap or ship their first drafts in the real world?

Michael Larabel, reporting at Phoronix: Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles. Alice "psykose" who is easily responsible for the highest number of commits per author over the past year has decided to step down from maintaining her packages.

These Alpine aports stats put her at 13,894 commits over the past year. In comparison, the second most prolific packager saw just 2,053 commits... Or put another way, psykose has 6.7x the number of commits as the next packager. The 13.8k commits is also about half of the 26.8k commits seen in total over the past year. Over the weekend I was alerted to the fact that psykose/nekopsykose has begun dropping maintainership of packages she maintained. All of her recent alpinelinux/aports commits two days ago were removing packages she oversaw.

Saleforce's chief impact officer, writing in Forbes: Code and computer programming — the backbone of modern business — has a long way to go before it can be called "green..." According to a recent report from the science journal Patterns, the information and communication technology sector accounts for up to 3.9% of global emissions... So far, the focus has been on reducing energy consumption in data centers and moving electrical grids away from fossil fuels. Now, coders and designers are ready for a similar push in software, crypto proof of work and AI compute power...

Our research revealed that 75% of UX designers, software developers and IT operations managers want software to do less damage to the environment. Yet nearly one in two don't know how to take action. Half of these technologists admit to not knowing how to mitigate environmental harm in their work, leading to 34% acknowledging that they "rarely or never" consider carbon emissions while typing a new line of code... Earlier this year, Salesforce launched a sustainability guide for technology that provides practical recommendations for aligning climate goals with software development.
In the article the Salesforce executive makes four recommendations, urging coders to design sites in ways that reduce the energy needed to display them. ("Even small changes to image size, color and type options can scale to large impacts.") They also recommend writing application code that uses less energy, which "can lead to significant emissions reductions, particularly when deployed at scale. Leaders can seek out apps that are coded to run natively in browsers which can lead to improvement in performance and a reduction in energy use."

Their article includes links to the energy-saving hackathon GreenHack and the non-profit Green Software Foundation. (Their site recently described how the IT company AVEVA used a Raspberry Pi in back of a hardware cluster as part of a system to measure software's energy consumption.)

But their first recommendation for fighting the climate crisis is "Adopt new technology like AI" to "make the software development cycle more energy efficient." ("At Salesforce, we're starting to see tremendous potential in using generative AI to optimize code and are excited to release this to customers in the future.")

Python's Global Interpreter Lock "allows only one thread to hold the control of the Python interpreter," according to the tutorial site Real Python. (They add, "it can be a performance bottleneck in CPU-bound and multi-threaded code.")

Friday the Python Steering Council "announced its intent to accept PEP 703 (Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython), with initial support possibly showing up in the 3.13 release," reports LWN.net.

From the Steering Council's announcement: It's clear that the overall sentiment is positive, both for the general idea and for PEP 703 specifically. The Steering Council is also largely positive on both. We intend to accept PEP 703, although we're still working on the acceptance details...

Our base assumptions are:

- Long-term (probably 5+ years), the no-GIL build should be the only build. We do not want to create a permanent split between with-GIL and no-GIL builds (and extension modules).

- We want to be very careful with backward compatibility. We do not want another Python 3 situation, so any changes in third-party code needed to accommodate no-GIL builds should just work in with-GIL builds (although backward compatibility with older Python versions will still need to be addressed). This is not Python 4. We are still considering the requirements we want to place on ABI compatibility and other details for the two builds and the effect on backward compatibility.

- Before we commit to switching entirely to the no-GIL build, we need to see community support for it. We can't just flip the default and expect the community to figure out what work they need to do to support it. We, the core devs, need to gain experience with the new build mode and all it entails. We will probably need to figure out new C APIs and Python APIs as we sort out thread safety in existing code. We also need to bring along the rest of the Python community as we gain those insights and make sure the changes we want to make, and the changes we want them to make, are palatable.

- We want to be able to change our mind if it turns out, any time before we make no-GIL the default, that it's just going to be too disruptive for too little gain. Such a decision could mean rolling back all of the work, so until we're certain we want to make no-GIL the default, code specific to no-GIL should be somewhat identifiable.
The current plan is to "add the no-GIL build as an experimental build mode, presumably in 3.13... [A]fter we have confidence that there is enough community support to make production use of no-GIL viable, we make the no-GIL build supported but not the default (yet), and set a target date/Python version for making it the default... We expect this to take at least a year or two, possibly more."

"Long-term, we want no-GIL to be the default, and to remove any vestiges of the GIL (without unnecessarily breaking backward compatibility)... We think it may take as much as five years to get to this stage."

There's been several articles on how programmers can adapt to writing code with AI. But presumably AI companies will then gather more data from how real-world programmers use their tools.

So long-time Slashdot reader ThePub2000 has a question. "Where's the generative leaps if the humans using it as an assistant don't make leaps forward in a public space?" Let's posit a couple of things:

- First, your AI responses are good enough to use.
- Second, because they're good enough to use you no longer need to post publicly about programming questions.

Where does AI go after it's "perfected itself"?

Or, must we live in a dystopian world where code is scrapable for free, regardless of license, but access to support in an AI from that code comes at a price?

Last weekend in Portland, Oregon, the Software Freedom Conservancy hosted a new conference called the Free and Open Source Software Yearly.

And long-time free software activist Bradley M. Kuhn (currently a policy fellow/hacker-in-residence for the Software Freedom Conservancy) hosted a lively panel discussion on "the recent change" to public source code releases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux which shed light on what may happen next. The panel also included:

• benny Vasquez, the Chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation
• Jeremy Alison, Samba co-founder and software engineer at CIQ (focused on Rocky Linux). Allison is also Jeremy Allison - Sam Slashdot reader #8,157.
• James (Jim) Wright, Oracle's chief architect for Open Source policy/strategy/compliance/alliances

"Red Hat themselves did not reply to our repeated requests to join us on this panel... SUSE was also invited but let us know they were unable to send someone on short notice to Portland for the panel."

One interesting audience question for the panel came from Karsten Wade, a one-time Red Hat senior community architect who left Red Hat in April after 21 years, but said he was "responsible for bringing the CentOS team onboard to Red Hat." Wade argued that CentOS "was always doing a clean rebuild from source RPMS of their own..." So "isn't all of this thunder doing Red Hat's job for them, of trying to get everyone to say, 'This thing is not the equivalent to RHEL.'"

In response Jeremy Alison made a good point. "None of us here are the arbiters of whether it's good enough of a rebuild of Red Hat Linux. The customers are the arbiters." But this led to an audience member asking a very forward-looking question: what are the chances the community could adopt a new (and open) enterprise Linux standard that distributions could follow. AlmaLinux's Vasquez replied, "Chances are real high... I think everyone sees that as the obvious answer. I think that's the obvious next step. I'll leave it at that." And Oracle's Wright added "to the extent that the market asks us to standardize? We're all responsive."

When asked if they'd consider adding features not found in RHEL ("such as high-security gates through reproducible builds") AlmaLinux's Vasquez said "100% -- yeah. One of the things that we're kind of excited about is the opportunities that this opens for us. We had decided we were just going to focus on this north star of 1:1 Red Hat no matter what -- and with that limitation being removed, we have all kinds of options." And CIQ's Alison said "We're working on FIPS certification for an earlier version of Rocky, that Red Hat, I don't believe, FIPS certified. And we're planning to release that."

AlmaLinux's Vasquez emphasized later that "We're just going to build Enterprise Linux. Red Hat has done a great job of establishing a fantastic target for all of us, but they don't own the rights to enterprise Linux. We can make this happen, without forcing an uncomfortable conversation with Red Hat. We can get around this."

And Alison later applied a "Star Wars" quote to Red Hat's predicament. "The more things you try and grab, the more things slip through your fingers." That is, "The more somebody tries to exert control over a codebase, the more the pushback will occur from people who collaborate in that codebase." AlmaLinux's Vasquez also said they're already "in conversations" with independent software vendors about the "flow of support" into non-Red Hat distributions -- though that's always been the case. "Finding ways to reduce the barrier for those independent software vendors to add official support for us is, like, maybe more cumbersome now, but it's the same problem that we've had..."

Early in the discussion Oracle's Jim Wright pointed out that even Red Hat's own web site defines open source code as "designed to be publicly accessible — anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit." ("Until now," Wright added pointedly...) There was some mild teasing of Oracle during the 50-minute discussion -- someone asked at one point if they'd re-license their proprietary implementation of ZFS under the GPL. But at the end of the panel, Oracle's Jim Wright still reminded the audience that "If you want to work on open source Linux, we are hiring."

Read Slashdot's transcript of highlights from the discussion.

An anonymous reader shares this report from Dice.com: C++ is enjoying a surge in popularity, according to the latest update to the TIOBE Index, which tracks programming languages' "buzz."

C++ currently sits right behind C and Python on TIOBE's list. "A few months ago, the programming C++ language claimed position 3 of the TIOBE index (at the expense of Java). But C++ has not finished its rise. C seems to be its next victim," added the note accompanying the data... ["At the moment, the gap between the two is only 0.76%."]

Matlab, Scratch and Rust also match their all time high records at respectively positions #10, #12 and #17.
So here, according to TIOBE, are the 10 most popular programmings languages:

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Visual Basic
8. SQL
9. PHP
10. MATLAB

The site I Programmer digs deeper: C++ was the only one of the top four languages to see a positive year-on-year change in its percentage rating — adding 0.79% to stand at 10.8%. Python had the smallest loss of the entire Top 20, -0.01% leaving it with a share of 13,42% while Visual Basic had the greatest loss at -2.07%. This, combined with JavaScript gaining 1.34%, led to JavaScript overtaking it to occupy #6, its highest ever ranking in the TIOBE Index.
They also note that COBOL "had a 3-month rise going from a share of 0.41% in April to 0.86% in July which moved it into #20 on the index."

The major gaming platform Roblox has suffered a major data breach, leading to the release of personal information including addresses from those who attended the Roblox Developer Conference between 2017-2020. PCGamer reports: The leak contains almost 4,000 names, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and physical addresses. Such identifying information is gold dust for bad actors, and raises serious questions about the data security of one of the largest gaming platforms around. The website haveibeenpwned says the original breach date was 18 December 2020, with the information becoming available on 18 July 2023, with a total of 3,943 compromised accounts. The site notes that as well as all the above information, the leak even includes each individual's t-shirt size.

The implications of this for those affected are identity theft and scams, with the quantity of data especially worrying: this is basically all you need to effectively impersonate someone. Beyond the above statement, Roblox has made no further comment, and it's likely that the ramifications of this will continue to unfold for some time, especially if anyone on the list is indeed targeted. Anyone concerned should search on haveibeenpwned and enable two-factor authentication on all accounts (as well as keeping an especially close eye on bank transactions for a while). Troy Hunt, the engineer behind haveibeenpwned, said the leak was posted in 2021 but according to an unnamed source didn't spread outside of niche Roblox communities, while at the time the company did not publicly disclose the leak or alert anyone affected. The leak then appeared on a public forum a few days ago. "Roblox is aware of a third-party security issue where there were indications of unauthorized access to limited personal information of a subset of our creator community," said a Roblox spokesperson to PC Gamer. "We engaged independent experts to support the investigation led by our information security team. Those who are impacted will receive an email communicating the next steps we are taking to support them. We will continue to be vigilant in monitoring and vetting the cyber security posture of Roblox and our third-party vendors."

Roblox is offering developers another way to earn money by allowing them to offer subscriptions within their experiences, according to a blog post published Tuesday. The Verge reports: Roblox already offers developers a lot of ways to monetize their experiences, including the ability to sell virtual items in an experience or on the Roblox marketplace, offering in-experience passes to certain content and gating experiences behind paid access. However, those examples are all one-time fees, and Roblox argues that subscriptions would offer a way for developers to "establish a recurring economic relationship with their users and potentially increase the predictability of their earnings." (Other monetization options include subscriptions to private servers, engagement-based payouts, and slotting in Roblox's "Immersive Ads.")

Subscriptions would also give Roblox another thing it can point to as a reason to develop for its metaverse platform instead of others. Epic Games' new system for Fortnite, for example, rewards creators based on factors like how long people play their experiences but doesn't allow creators to directly sell virtual goods or subscriptions inside those experiences. Developers looking for more flexibility in how they monetize might choose Roblox instead.

Most outsourced programmers in India will see their jobs wiped out in the next year or two, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque said. CNBC reports: Mostaque, on a call with UBS analysts, said that most of the country's outsourced coders will lose their jobs as the effects of AI mean that it is now possible for software to be developed with far fewer people. "I think that it affects different types of jobs in different ways," Mostaque said on a call with analysts at the Swiss investment bank last week. "If you're doing a job in front of a computer, and no one ever sees you, then it's massively impactful, because these models are like really talented grads."

According to Mostaque, not everyone will be affected in the same way, however. That is due in no small part to differing rules and regulations around the world. Countries with stronger labor laws, like France, will be less likely to see such an impact, for example. In India, Mostaque said, "outsourced coders up to level three programmers will be gone in the next year or two, whereas in France, you'll never fire a developer." "So it affects different models in different countries in different ways in different sectors."

Mostaque reiterated a previous statement he made saying that there will be "no more programmers" in five years' time -- however, he caveated this to say that he meant coders in the traditional sense. "Why would you have to write code where the computer can write code better? When you deconstruct the programming thing from bug testing to unit testing to ideation, an AI can do that, just better," Mostaque said. "But it won't be doing it automatically, it will be AI 'co-pilots,'" Mostaque said. "That means less people are needed for classical programming, but then are they needed for other things? This is the question and this is the balance that we have to understand, because different areas are also affected differently."

Wix, a longtime fixture of the web building space, is betting that today's customers don't particularly care to spend time customizing every aspect of their site's appearance. TechCrunch: The company's new AI Site Generator tool, announced today, will let Wix users describe their intent and generate a website complete with a homepage, inner pages and text and images -- as well as business-specific sections for events, bookings and more. Avishai Abrahami, Wix's co-founder and CEO, says that the goal was to provide customers with "real value" as they build their sites and grow their businesses. [...] AI Site Generator takes several prompts -- any descriptions of sites -- and uses a combination of in-house and third-party AI systems to create the envisioned site. In a chatbot-like interface, the tool asks a series of questions about the nature of the site and business, attempting to translate this into a custom web template. ChatGPT generates the text for the website while Wix's AI creates the site design and images.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The tech-backed and directed nonprofit Code.org is back with a new call for America's Governors, announcing its "10th policy recommendation for all states." Their recommendation? "To require all students to take computer science to earn a high school diploma."

Arguing that "artificial intelligence has increased the urgency to ensure our students are adequately prepared for a rapidly changing world," Code.org explains its vision: that states have "a policy that requires all students to earn a credit named 'computer science' or has a related name that includes 'computer science'". Heretofore, Code.org has said, "Our vision is that every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science, just like biology, chemistry, or algebra."

Code.org's call for a high school CS graduation requirement in response to recent AI breakthroughs comes two months after the non-profit launched TeachAI, a Code.org-led and seed-funded effort supported by a coalition of tech and educational organizations, including Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Meta, and (newly AI-powered) Khan Academy. "TeachAI," the initiative's website explains, "is committing to provide thought leadership to guide governments and educational leaders in aligning education with the needs of an increasingly AI-driven world and connecting the discussion of teaching with AI to teaching about AI and computer science."

Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: I'd been waiting for Oracle to throw its hat into the ring for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Linux source-code fight. I knew it was only a matter of time. On July 10, Oracle's Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, and Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development, declared: "IBM's actions are not in your best interest. By killing CentOS as a RHEL alternative and attacking AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, IBM is eliminating one way your customers save money and make a larger share of their wallet available to you."

In fact, Oracle now presents itself as an open-source Linux champion: "Oracle has always made Oracle Linux binaries and source freely available to all. We do not have subscription agreements that interfere with a subscriber's rights to redistribute Oracle Linux. On the other hand, IBM subscription agreements specify that you're in breach if you use those subscription services to exercise your GPLv2 rights." As of June 21, IBM no longer publicly releases RHEL source code -- in short, the gloves are off, and the fight's on. But this is also just the latest move in a fight that's older than many of you. [...]

Mike McGrath, Red Hat's vice president of core platforms, explained why Red Hat would no longer be releasing RHEL's code, but only CentOS Stream's code, because "thousands of [Red Hat] people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fixing bugs, integrating different packages and then supporting that work for a long time ... We have to pay the people to do that work." That sentiment is certainly true. But I also feel that Oracle takes the worst possible spin, with Screven and Coekaerts commenting: "IBM doesn't want to continue publicly releasing RHEL source code because it has to pay its engineers? That seems odd, given that Red Hat as a successful independent open source company chose to publicly release RHEL source and pay its engineers for many years before IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion."

So, what will Oracle do now? For starters, Oracle Linux will continue to be RHEL-compatible through RHEL 9.2. After that release -- and without access to the published RHEL source code -- there are no guarantees. But Screven and Coekaerts suggest that "if an incompatibility does affect a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to remediate the problem." As for Oracle Linux's code: "Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstream distributions of every kind, community, and commercial. We are happy to work with distributors to ease that process, work together on the content of Oracle Linux, and ensure Oracle software products are certified on your distribution."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Recalling a past Computer History Museum look at the evolution of programming languages, Doug Meil ponders the age-old question of Why Are There So Many Programming Languages? in a new Communications of the ACM blog post.

"It's worth noting and admiring the audacity of PL/I (1964)," Meil writes, "which was aiming to be that 'one good programming language.' The name says it all: Programming Language 1. There should be no need for 2, 3, or 4. [Meil expands on this thought in Lessons from PL/I: A Most Ambitious Programming Language.] Though PL/I's plans of becoming the Highlander of computer programming didn't play out like the designers intended, they were still pulling on a key thread in software: why so many languages? That question was already being asked as far back as the early 1960's."

One of PL/I's biggest fans was Digital Research Inc. (DRI) founder Gary Kildall, who crafted the PL/I-inspired PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers) in 1973 for Intel. But IBM priced PL/I higher than the languages it sought to replace, contributing to PL/I's failure to gain traction. (Along the lines of how IBM's deal with Microsoft gave rise to a price disparity that was the undoing of Kildall's CP/M OS, bundled with every PC in a 'non-royalty' deal. Windows was priced at $40 while CP/M was offered 'a la carte' at $240.) As a comp.lang.pl1 poster explained in 2006, "The truth of the matter is that Gresham's Law: 'Bad money drives out good' or Ruskin's principle: 'The hoi polloi always prefer an inferior, cheap product over a superior, more expensive one' are what govern here."

Perl 5.38 was released this week "after being in development for more than one year," reports Phoronix. "Perl 5.38 brings a new experimental syntax for defining object classes where per-instance data is stored in 'field' variables that behave like lexicals."

"Maybe, just maybe, the new features introduced into the language in this newest version will attract much sought new talent," writes the site I Programmer, noting the argument that Perl is installed by default everywhere — and has the "fun factor... The class keyword is part of the plan to bring effective object-oriented programming to the Perl core while still keeping Perl being Perl."

The Perl docs warn that "This remains a new and experimental feature, and is very much still under development. It will be the subject of much further addition, refinement and alteration in future releases." But "Since Perl 5, support for objects revolved around the concept of blessing references with a package name," notes updated documentation, which points out this new class syntax "isn't a bless wrapper, but a completely new system built right into the perl interpreter." The class keyword declares a new package which is intended to be a class... classes automatically get a constructor named new... Just like with other references, when object reference count reaches zero it will automatically be destroyed.
Phoronx notes that Perl 5.38 also brings a new PERL_RAND_SEED environment variable "for controlling seed behavior for random number generation," along with some new APIs. And I Programmer adds that Perl 5.38 also adds support for Unicode 15.0, adding 4, 489 characters, for a total of 149,186 characters. Other additions include enhanced regular expressions, plus defined-or and logical-or assignment default expressions in signatures.

According to NBC News, the FBI created a national online database in May to facilitate information sharing between hundreds of police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country pertaining to swatting incidents. From the report: No central agency has tracked swatting incidents or suspects in the U.S., so official statistics are not available. By 2019, there were an estimated 1,000 swatting incidents domestically each year, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League, and each incident is estimated to cost at least $10,000 to affected communities, even before expenditures on follow-up work like investigations, property repairs and counseling. Swatting is increasingly enabled by technology that can be used to mask a caller's real voice, their phone number or IP address (also called "spoofing") or to make their false report sound more credible.

[Chief Scott Schubert with the bureau's Criminal Justice Information Services headquarters in Clarksburg, West Virginia] told NBC News that the FBI's new centralized database should help the agency "get that common picture of what's going on across our nation so we can learn from that." [...] While the earliest recorded case of swatting occurred in 2002, to this day, there is no specific law criminalizing swatting in the U.S., says John Jay's Shapiro. "Without a statute in place, there's no designated resources or training for investigating swatting incidents," she said. "And the 911 dispatchers do not have the resources and training they need to differentiate between actual emergencies and false reports."

Legally, the False Information and Hoaxes statute, also known as section 1038, is most frequently used to prosecute swatting. Other statutes can sometimes apply -- one pertaining to interstate threats involving explosives and another pertaining to interstate communications, which refers to extortion or threats to injure or kidnap somebody. "Too often, perpetrators are getting a slap on the wrist compared to the consequences suffered by their victims," Shapiro said.