An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Low-code and no-code development is often seen as the realm of citizen developers, but the segment of the enterprise where low-code and no-code has gained significant traction is among professional developers themselves. And, importantly, it's making their jobs better in two ways: providing tools for faster software development and deployment, as well as elevating their roles in enterprises to that of teachers and facilitators for potential citizen developers.

A recent survey of 860 developers by OutSystems finds a majority of low-code users -- most of whom also use traditional coding languages alongside low-code -- report that they are "very satisfied" with their team productivity (59%), compared to 41% of traditional developers. Most low-coders, 57%, are also very satisfied with the quality of tools at their disposal to complete their work, compared to 36% of their traditional coding counterparts. In addition, 71% of low-code users said they were able to stick to the typical 40-hour work week, compared to only 44% of traditional developers. Additionally, 63% of low-code developers indicate they are happy with their salary and benefits compared to 40% of traditional developers.

Not only is low-code and no-code making things easier, it is also elevating the roles of technology professionals within their enterprises, to facilitator, educators, and consultants. Industry observers agree. "The professional's role is now to customize and connect the low-code solution to the organization's resources," relates Moses Guttmann, CEO and co-founder of ClearML. Their roles "shift towards mainly automation and orchestration, taking a low-code process and helping the low-code infrastructure gain access to different resources within the organization. Think of it as abstracting the databases and providing access to the orchestration -- such as cloud infrastructure to execute the low-code application." This can only mean more Agile development for the next generation of applications, with business-savvy developers and tech-savvy business users working side by side. "Citizen developers are typically growth-minded, innovative problem solvers with an active understanding of the business' overarching goals," says Aaron White, CTO and co-founder of Vendr. "In tandem with overseeing the work completed in a low-code or no-code environment, professional developers -- especially those leading teams -- should strive to recognize these employees' talents, actively enabling them to contribute to the development process." "It takes away a lot of the day-to-day implementation-related tasks and allows developers to focus on more architectural and strategic concerns," says Om Vyas, co-founder and chief product officer for oak9. "It puts them in a position to have a greater business impact. But also, with low-code and no-code approaches, when the one-size-fits-all pattern does not work for you, it will create work for these professionals to amend or customize to add their own implementations."

In many cases, "a low-code/no-code approach may operate as a complete solution. That said, IT and engineering may need to step in from time to time, to fine-tune the details," White adds.

Apple just launched new ad placements on the App Store, and developers aren't happy with the types of ads surfacing beneath their apps. From a report: As spotted by MacRumors, several app developers have pointed out that ads for gambling have started appearing in the "You Might Also Like" sections beneath their App Store listings, which is just one of the new places Apple has started sticking ads. Developer Simon B. Stovring posted a screenshot of an ad for an online casino app appearing beneath his text editor Runestone. Stovring says he visited the page for his app 10 times and noticed that ads for gambling apps showed up on three visits. Marco Arment, the developer of the podcast app Overcast, said on Twitter he's "really not OK with" the gambling ads showing up on his app product page. Another user replied to Arment's tweet, noting that the App Store is even showing gambling ads beneath apps designed specifically to help users recover from a gambling addiction, while another noticed gambling ads have even popped up on children's education apps.

Apple has announced updates to the App Store Review Guidelines, offering guidance for apps offering cryptocurrency and NFTs. Apple Insider reports: The text for the rule has been changed to include the following: "Apps may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as license keys, augmented reality markers, QR codes, cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency wallets, etc." The rule change is no surprise, as Apple only allows alternative payment systems in certain countries.

An addition to the 3.11 rule is as follows: "Apps may use in-app purchase to sell and sell services related to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), such as minting, listing, and transferring. Apps may allow users to view their own NFTs, provided that NFT ownership does not unlock features or functionality within the app. Apps may allow users to browse NFT collections owned by others, provided that the apps may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase."

Finally, Apple has revised rule 3.1.5(iii) to include cryptocurrency exchanges. These companies let people buy and sell cryptocurrencies using traditional fiat currency. "Exchanges: Apps may facilitate transactions or transmissions of cryptocurrency on an approved exchange, provided they are offered only in countries or regions where the app has appropriate licensing and permissions to provide a cryptocurrency exchange."

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would be releasing new hardware to encourage more developers to start using and supporting the Arm version of Windows. Dubbed "Project Volterra," all we knew about it at the time was that it would use an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and NVMe-based storage, that it would support at least two monitors, and that it would have a decent number of ports. Today, Microsoft is putting Volterra out into the world, complete with a snappy new name: the Windows Dev Kit 2023. From a report: The Dev Kit 2023 will use a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 -- essentially the same chip as the Microsoft SQ3 in the new 5G version of the Surface Pro 9 -- plus 512GB of storage and a whopping 32GB of RAM for the surprisingly low price of $599.

We don't know exactly how fast the 8cx Gen 3 will be (Qualcomm says "up to 85 percent faster" CPU performance than the 8cx Gen 2, which would put it somewhere below but within spitting distance of modern Core i5 laptop CPU). But 512GB of storage and 32GB of memory should make the Dev Kit 2023 useful as a development and testing environment. Microsoft says the box can connect to up to three monitors simultaneously using its two USB-C ports and mini DisplayPort and that up to two of those displays can be 4K screens running at 60 Hz. Three USB-A ports, gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.1 round out the connectivity options.

RedMonk has released its latest quarterly rankings of popular programming languages, arguing that "The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends."

Their methodology? "We extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction." Below are this quarter's results:

1. JavaScript
2. Python
3. Java
4. PHP
5. C#
6. CSS
7. C++
7. TypeScript
9. Ruby
10. C
11. Swift
12. R
12. Objective-C
14. Shell
15. Scala
15. Go
17. PowerShell
17. Kotlin
19. Rust
19. Dart

Their analysis of the latest rankings note "movement is increasingly rare.... the top 20 has been stable for multiple runs. As has been speculated about in this space previously, it seems increasingly clear that the hypothesis of a temporary equilibrium of programming language usage is supported by the evidence.... [W]e may have hit a point of relative — if temporary — contentment with the wide variety of languages available for developers' usage."

And yet this quarter TypeScript has risen from #8 to #7, now tied with C++, benefiting from attributes like its interoperability with an existing popular language with an increased availability of security-related features. "There is little suggestion at present that the language is headed anywhere but up. The only real question is on what timeframe." Unlike TypeScript, Go's trajectory has been anything but clear. While it grew steadily and reasonably swiftly as languages go, it has appeared to be stalled, never placing higher than 14th and having dropped into 16 for the last three runs. This quarter, however, Go rose one spot in the rankings back up to 15. In and of itself, this is a move of limited significance, as the further one goes down the rankings the less significant the differences between them are, ranking-wise. But it has been over a year since we've seen movement from Go, which raises the question of whether there is any room for further upward ascent or whether it will remain hovering in the slot one would expect from a technically well regarded but not particularly versatile (from a use case standpoint) language.

Like Go, Kotlin had spent the last three runs in the same position. It and Rust had been moving in lockstep in recent quarters, but while Rust enters its fourth consecutive run in 19th place, Kotlin managed to achieve some separation this quarter jumping one spot up from 18 to 17.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Register: GitHub Copilot -- a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet -- has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim. On Monday, Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, and developer, announced he is working with Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate the possibility of filing a copyright claim against GitHub. There are two potential lines of attack here: is GitHub improperly training Copilot on open source code, and is the tool improperly emitting other people's copyrighted work -- pulled from the training data -- to suggest code snippets to users?

Butterick has been critical of Copilot since its launch. In June he published a blog post arguing that "any code generated by Copilot may contain lurking license or IP violations," and thus should be avoided. That same month, Denver Gingerich and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) said their organization would stop using GitHub, largely as a result of Microsoft and GitHub releasing Copilot without addressing concerns about how the machine-learning model dealt with different open source licensing requirements.

Copilot's capacity to copy code verbatim, or nearly so, surfaced last week when Tim Davis, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, found that Copilot, when prompted, would reproduce his copyrighted sparse matrix transposition code. Asked to comment, Davis said he would prefer to wait until he has heard back from GitHub and its parent Microsoft about his concerns. In an email to The Register, Butterick indicated there's been a strong response to news of his investigation. "Clearly, many developers have been worried about what Copilot means for open source," he wrote. "We're hearing lots of stories. Our experience with Copilot has been similar to what others have found -- that it's not difficult to induce Copilot to emit verbatim code from identifiable open source repositories. As we expand our investigation, we expect to see more examples. "But keep in mind that verbatim copying is just one of many issues presented by Copilot. For instance, a software author's copyright in their code can be violated without verbatim copying. Also, most open-source code is covered by a license, which imposes additional legal requirements. Has Copilot met these requirements? We're looking at all these issues." GitHub's documentation for Copilot warns that the output may contain "undesirable patterns" and puts the onus of intellectual property infringement on the user of Copilot, notes the report.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy is less willing to set aside how Copilot deals with software licenses. "What Microsoft's GitHub has done in this process is absolutely unconscionable," he said. "Without discussion, consent, or engagement with the FOSS community, they have declared that they know better than the courts and our laws about what is or is not permissible under a FOSS license. They have completely ignored the attribution clauses of all FOSS licenses, and, more importantly, the more freedom-protecting requirements of copyleft licenses."

Brett Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in Ireland, told The Register in an email, "AI-assisted programming tools are not going to go away and will continue to evolve. Where these tools fit into the current landscape of programming practices, law, and community norms is only just beginning to be explored and will also continue to evolve." He added: "An interesting question is: what will emerge as the main drivers of this evolution? Will these tools fundamentally alter future practices, law, and community norms -- or will our practices, law and community norms prove resilient and drive the evolution of these tools?"

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for version 6.1 of the project and added an appeal for developers to make his life easier by adding code earlier in the development cycle. The Register reports: "Let me just say that after I got my machine sorted out and caught up with the merge window, I was somewhat frustrated with various late pull requests. I've mentioned this before, but it's _really_ quite annoying to get quite a few pull requests in the last few days of the merge window."

He then offered further guidance on how kernel devs can do it right. "Yes, the merge window is two weeks, but that's very much to allow me time to look things over, not 'two weeks to hurriedly put together a branch that you send Linus on Friday of the second week'," he wrote. "The whole 'do an all-nighter to get the paper in the day before the deadline' is something that should have gone out the window after high school. Not for kernel development." His next line was: "You know who you are."

"Anyway, it's not the first time I've said this, I doubt it will be the last. But maybe more people could take it to heart, ok?" he added, before concluding his post with a slightly non-traditional call for testers to visit Linux's git tree because "The merge window may not be the biggest ever, but it's certainly big enough that the shortlog is much too big to post, and below is just my usual merge log." "For all the gory details, please refer to the git tree."

A new resource featuring interactive Q&A's and one-on-ones for developers has launched today called "Ask Apple." 9to5Mac reports: Apple announced the new developer series in a newsroom post today: "Developers participating in Ask Apple can inquire about a variety of topics, such as testing on the latest seeds; implementing new and updated frameworks from Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC); adopting new features like the Dynamic Island; moving to Swift, SwiftUI, and accessibility; and preparing their apps for new OS and hardware releases. Ask Apple is free of charge and registration is open to all members of the Apple Developer Program and the Apple Developer Enterprise Program."

Ask Apple will kick off with the first round of "opportunities" from October 17-21. Apple says it will be an ongoing series. 9to5Mac highlights what you can expect from "Ask Apple": - Ask questions to various Apple team members through Q&As on Slack or in one-on-one office hours
- Q&As allow developers to connect with Apple evangelists, engineers, and designers to get their questions answered, share their learnings, and engage with other developers around the world
- Office hours are focused on creating and distributing compelling apps that take advantage of the latest in technology and design
- Developers can ask for code-level assistance, design guidance, input on implementing technologies and frameworks, advice on resolving issues, or help with App Review Guidelines and distribution tools
- Office hours will be hosted in time zones around the world and in multiple languages

"The Rust programming language is getting so popular that the team behind it is creating a team that's dedicated to defining the default Rust coding style," reports ZDNet: Each language has style guides and, if they're popular enough, may have multiple style guides from major users, like Google, which has its guide for C++ — the language Chrome is written in. Python's Guido van Rossum's posted his styling conventions here.

Rust, which reached version 1.0 in 2015, has a style guide in the "rustfmt" or 'Rust formatting tool' published on GitHub. The tool automatically formats Rust code to let developers focus on output and aims to reduce the steep learning curve confronting new Rust developers. The guide instructs developers to "Use spaces, not tabs" and says "each level of indentation must be 4 spaces", for example....

But the team responsible for writing the style guide between 2016 and 2018 has "by design" come to end, so now it's now been decided to create the Rust style team, consisting of Josh Triplett, Caleb Cartwright, Michal Goulet, and Jane Lusby. The crew will first tackle a "backlog of new language constructs that lack formatting guidance" and move on to "defining and implementing the mechanisms to evolve the default Rust style, and then begin introducing style improvements."

The work includes minor language changes, big structural changes, and backwards compatibility and the style team wants to craft the tool to make it current for easier coding in Rust, and help adoption.
New constructs "by default, get ignored and not formatted by rustfmt," according to a blog post by the Rust style team, "and subsequently need formatting added. Some of this work has fallen to the rustfmt team in recent years, but the rustfmt team would prefer to implement style determinations made by another team rather than making such determinations itself."

The post also notes that the backwards compatibility maintained by rustfmt "also prevents evolving the Rust style to take community desires into account and improve formatting over time." rustfmt provides various configuration options to change its default formatting, and many of those options represent changes that many people in the community would like enabled by default... but [rustfmt] cannot make this the default without causing continuous integration failures in existing projects. We need a way to evolve the default Rust style compatibly, similar in spirit to the mechanisms we use for Rust editions: allowing existing style to continue working, and allowing people to opt into new style.

To solve both of these problems, RFC 3309 has revived the Rust style team, with three goals:

- Making determinations about styling for new Rust constructs
- Evolving the existing Rust style
- Defining mechanisms to evolve the Rust style while taking backwards compatibility into account

We don't plan to make any earth-shattering style changes; the look and feel of Rust will remain largely the same. Evolutions to the default Rust style will largely consist of established rustfmt options people already widely enable, or would enable if they were stable. We expect that the initial work of the style team will focus on clearing a backlog of new language constructs that lack formatting guidance. Afterwards, we will look towards defining and implementing the mechanisms to evolve the default Rust style, and then begin introducing style improvements.

Greg Lavender, CTO of Intel, spoke to VentureBeat about the company's efforts to help developers build applications that can run on any operating system. From the report: "Today in the accelerated computing and GPU world, you can use CUDA and then you can only run on an Nvidia GPU, or you can go use AMD's CUDA equivalent running on an AMD GPU,â Lavender told VentureBeat. "You can't use CUDA to program an Intel GPU, so what do you use?" That's where Intel is contributing heavily to the open-source SYCL specification (SYCL is pronounced like "sickle") that aims to do for GPU and accelerated computing what Java did decades ago for application development. Intel's investment in SYCL is not entirely selfless and isn't just about supporting an open-source effort; it's also about helping to steer more development toward its recently released consumer and data center GPUs. SYCL is an approach for data parallel programming in the C++ language and, according to Lavender, it looks a lot like CUDA.

To date, SYCL development has been managed by the Khronos Group, which is a multi-stakeholder organization that is helping to build out standards for parallel computing, virtual reality and 3D graphics. On June 1, Intel acquired Scottish development firm Codeplay Software, which is one of the leading contributors to the SYCL specification. "We should have an open programming language with extensions to C++ that are being standardized, that can run on Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs without changing your code," Lavender said. Lavender is also a realist and he knows that there is a lot of code already written specifically for CUDA. That's why Intel developers built an open-source tool called SYCLomatic, which aims to migrate CUDA code into SYCL. Lavender claimed that SYCLomatic today has coverage for approximately 95% of all the functionality that is present in CUDA. He noted that the 5% SYCLomatic doesn't cover are capabilities that are specific to Nvidia hardware.

With SYCL, Lavender said that there are code libraries that developers can use that are device independent. The way that works is code is written by a developer once, and then SYCL can compile the code to work with whatever architecture is needed, be it for an Nvidia, AMD or Intel GPU. Looking forward, Lavender said that he's hopeful that SYCL can become a Linux Foundation project, to further enable participation and growth of the open-source effort. [...] "We should have write once, run everywhere for accelerated computing, and then let the market decide which GPU they want to use, and level the playing field," Lavender said.

Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: Debian developers have been figuring out an updated stance to take on non-free firmware considering the increasing number of devices now having open-source Linux drivers but requiring closed-source firmware for any level of functionality. The voting on the non-free firmware matter has now concluded and the votes tallied... The debian votes option 5 as winning: "Change SC for non-free firmware in installer, one installer."

Basically the Debian Installer media will now be allowed to include non-free firmware and to automatically load/use it where necessary while informing the user of it, etc. Considering the state of the hardware ecosystem these days, it's reasonable and common sense since at least users will be able to easily make use of their graphics cards, network adapters, and more. Plus a number of modern CPU security mitigations also requiring the updated closed-source microcode. So all in, I am personally happy with this decision as it will allow for a more pleasant experience for Debian on modern systems and one akin to what is found with other Linux distributions. The solution is described in full via the Debian Wiki.

Apple's South Korean headquarters have been raided by antitrust regulators after a complaint was raised by developers that it is charging them over the standard 30% App Store commission rate. From a report: The dawn raid by the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) was reported by local media on Monday and covered on Friday by the Foss Patents blog, highlighting the ongoing investigation in the country into Apple's alleged abuse of market power. The complaint that sparked the raid was reportedly brought by mobile game developers who argued that Apple charges more than the typical 30% commission rate for purchases made in the App Store. As Foss Patents points out, Apple charges 30% of the price paid by end users, which includes value added tax (VAT), making it 10% higher than the amount on which Google bases its 30% commission, which doesn't include VAT. Apple is therefore collecting 33% (30% of 110%), not the headline 30% rate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Cloudflare, the security, performance and reliability company that went public three years ago, said this morning that it will help connect startups that use its serverless computing platform to dozens of venture firms that have collectively offered to invest up to $1.25 billion in the companies out of their existing funds. It's a smart, splashy incentive to entice more startups to use the now five-year-old product, which, according to Cloudflare, enables developers to build or augment apps without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. Cloudflare notes in a related press release that startups can scale so fast using the platform that Cloudflare acquired one last year: Zaraz, a startup that promises to speed up website performance with a single line of code. (Cloudflare isn't promising to acquire other startups, but the suggestion is in the air.)

Indeed, this funding program, as far as we can tell, is really about Cloudflare taking aim at hugely lucrative products like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Toward that end, we asked Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince over the weekend why Cloudflare thinks it can steal market share from these much bigger companies. "I wouldn't characterize it as 'stealing' market share from anyone," he said. "It's a matter of earning market share, and the way you earn market share is by providing a better product at a more affordable price." Asked how much more affordable, he said merely that it's "significantly less expensive than the legacy public clouds" because of how it's built. As Prince explains it, modern browsers "encounter new, untrusted code with nearly every page they open online today. They need a way to quickly and safely execute that code [and use a] technology called isolates to achieve that." Cloudflare Workers, which is the name of the platform, "takes the isolates technology inspired by the browser and makes it available as a developer platform."

Prince said the idea to connect startups on its platform with venture funding came out of existing relationships it has with VCs who'd begun noticing that more of their portfolio companies are using Cloudflare Workers as their developer platform. "When they did due diligence," said Prince, the VCs would "push [founders] on 'why Cloudflare and not a platform like AWS,' [and] the answer that startup after startup gave was that Cloudflare Workers scaled better, had better performance, and was less expensive to operate." "If you're a VC and you hear an answer like that multiple times from the most promising startups it causes you to take notice," he added. Cloudflare is not providing any funding or making any funding decisions, it makes clear. All funding decisions will be made by the participating firms.

Oracle has paid $23 million to the US Securities and Exchange Commission to settle corruption charges that subsidiaries in Turkey, United Arab Emirates and India used "slush funds" to bribe foreign officials to win business. The Register reports: The SEC said on Tuesday that Big Red violated provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) during a three-year period between 2016 and 2019. The cash that was apparently surreptitiously set aside was also spent on paying for foreign officials to attend technology conferences, which breaks Oracle's own internal policies and procedures. And the SEC said that in some instances, it found Oracle staff at the Turkish subsidiary had spent the funds on taking officials' families with them on International conferences or side trips to California.

"The creation of off-books slush funds inherently gives rise to the risk those funds will be used improperly, which is exactly what happened here at Oracle's Turkey, UAE, and India subsidiaries," said Charles Cain, FCPA unit chief at the SEC. "This matter highlights the critical need for effective internal accounting controls throughout the entirety of a company's operations," he added. Oracle, without admitting or denying the findings of the SEC's investigation, has agreed to "cease and desist from committing violations" of the anti-bribery, books and records, and internal accounting controls of the FCPA, said the Commission.

Apple says it will increase App Store prices across Europe and in some Asian markets next month as currencies weaken against the strong US dollar. The price increases will effect both in-app purchases and regular apps on the App Store starting on October 5th. From a report: All countries using the Euro, Sweden, South Korea, Chile, Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Japan will be affected by the price hikes. All Euro markets, except Montenegro, will see the base $0.99 app pricing move to $1.19 next month, a 20 percent jump. In Japan the hikes are more than 30 percent, amid the yen dropping to a new 24-year low against the US dollar.

The App Association brands itself as the leading voice for thousands of app developers around the world. In reality, the vast majority of its funding comes from Apple. From a report: The tech giant isn't a member of the association. But it plays a dominant behind-the-scenes role shaping the group's policy positions, according to four former App Association employees who asked not to be named discussing internal matters. In fact, critics note, the association's lobbying agenda tracks closely with Apple's -- even when it's at odds with app developers, the companies that make the individual games and programs that run on Apple's iPhone and other devices. The group, known as ACT, says it's not beholden to Apple, but confirmed that it derives more than half its funding from the company. The former employees say the actual percentage is much higher. The relationship between Apple and ACT illustrates how big companies quietly pour money into outside groups that promote their agenda in Washington. ACT representatives regularly testify in Congress, file court briefs in defense of Apple's positions and host annual "fly-in" meetings for developers with lawmakers. Rick VanMeter, a former congressional aide who is the head of rival developer group Coalition for App Fairness, said ACT's purported representation of app developers is deceptive, given its relationship with Apple.

The short answers are "yes" and "no." America's Constitution prohibits government intervention into public expression, reports the business-news radio show Marketplace, "protecting free speech and expression "through, for example.... writing, protesting and coding languages like JavaScript, HTML, Python and Perl."

Specifically protecting code started with the 1995 case of cryptographer Daniel Bernstein, who challenged America's "export controls" on encryption (which regulated it like a weapon). But they also spoke to technology lawyer Kendra Albert, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic, about the specific parameters of how America protects code as a form of expression: Albert: I think that the reality was that the position that code was a form of expression is in fact supported by a long history of First Amendment law. And that it, you know, is very consistent with how we see the First Amendment interpreted across a variety of contexts.... [O]ne of the questions courts ask is whether a regulation or legislation or a government action is specifically targeting speech, or whether the restrictions on speech are incidental, but not the overall intention. And that's actually one of the places you see kind of a lot of these difficulties around code as speech. The nature of many kinds of regulation may mean that they restrict code because of the things that particular forms of software code do in the world. But they weren't specifically meant to restrict the expressive conduct. And courts end up then having to sort of go through a test that was originally developed in the context of someone burning a draft card to figure out — OK, is this regulation, is the burden that it has on this form of expressive speech so significant that we can't regulate in this way? Or is this just not the focus, and the fact that there are some restrictions on speech as a result of the government attempting to regulate something else should not be the focus of the analysis?

Q: Congress and federal agencies as well as some states are looking to tighten regulations around cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. What role do you think the idea of code as speech will play in this environment moving forward?

Albert: The reality is that the First Amendment is not a total bar to regulation of speech. It requires the government meet a higher standard for regulating certain kinds of speech. That runs, to some extent, in conflict with how people imagine what "code is speech" does as sort of a total restriction on the regulation of software, of code, because it has expressive content. It just means that we treat code similarly to how we treat other forms of expression, and that the government can regulate them under certain circumstances.

While there is a lot of noise about the hottest programming languages and the evolution of Web3, blockchain and the metaverse, none of this will matter if the industry doesn't have highly skilled software developers to build them," argues ZDNet.

So they spoke to Ori Bendet, VP of product management at CheckMarx, a builder software that tests application security. His prediction? Automatic code generators (ACG) like Github CoPilot, AWS CodeWhisperer and Tab9 will eventually replace "traditional" coding. "Although ACG is not as good as developers may think," Bendet says, "over the next few years, every developer will have their code generated, leaving them more time to focus on their core business." As businesses turn to automation as a means of quickly building and deploying new apps and digital services, low code and no code tools will play a fundamental role in shaping the future of the internet. According to a 2021 Gartner forecast, by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will be based on low-code or no-code tools, compared to less than 25% in 2020. A lot of this work will be done by 'citizen developers' — employees who build business apps for themselves and other users using low code tools, but who don't have formal training in computer programming. In order to build a proficient citizen developer workforce, companies will need an equally innovative approach to training.

"Low code and no code tools are democratizing software development and providing opportunities for more people to build technology, prompting more innovation across industries," says Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow....

The rise of low-code and no-code will also help to further democratize tech jobs, creating more opportunities for talented individuals from non-tech or non-academic backgrounds. A 2022 survey by developer recruitment platforms CoderPad and CodinGame found that 81% of tech recruiters now readily hire from 'no-degree' candidate profiles. CodinGame COO Aude Barral believes this trend will only grow as the demand for software professionals intensifies.
Stack Overflow's CEO sees some limitations. "Without taking the time to learn the fundamentals of writing code or the context in which code is used, developers using low-code or code suggestion tools will hit a limit in the quality and functionality of their code."

How is this playing out in the real world of professional IT? I'd like to invite Slashdot's readers to share their own experiences in the comments.

Are you seeing low-code and no-code development replacing traditional coding?

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: A new study on the Impact of Programming on Primary Mathematics Learning (abstract only, full article $24.95 on ScienceDirect) is generating some buzz on Twitter amongst K-12 CS educator types. It concluded that:

1. Programming did not benefit mathematics learning compared to traditional activities
2. There's a negative though small effect of programming on mathematics learning
3. Mindful "high-road transfer" from programming to mathematics is not self-evident
4. Visual programming languages might distract students from mathematics activities

From the Abstract: "The aim of this study is to investigate whether a programming activity might serve as a learning vehicle for mathematics acquisition in grades four and five.... Classes were randomly assigned to the programming (with Scratch) and control conditions. Multilevel analyses indicate negative effects (effect size range 0.16 to 0.21) of the programming condition for the three mathematical notions.

"A potential explanation of these results is the difficulties in the transfer of learning from programming to mathematics."

The findings of the new study come 4+ years after preliminary results were released from the $1.5M 2015-2019 NSF-funded study Time4CS, a "partnership between Broward County Public Schools (FL), researchers at the University of Chicago, and [tech-bankrolled] Code.org," which explored whether learning CS using Code.org's CS Fundamentals curriculum may be linked to improved learning in math at the grade 3-5 level. Time4CS researchers concluded that the "quasi-experimental" study showed that "No significant differences in Florida State Assessment mathematics scores resulted between treatment and comparison groups."

Perl's major version number hasn't changed since 1994, notes a new blog post at Stack Overflow by Perl book author Dave Cross. Yet the programming language has still undergone "massive changes" between version 5.6 (summer of 2000) and version 5.36 (released this May).

But because the Perl development strives for backwards compatibility, "many new Perl features are hidden away behind feature guards and aren't available unless you explicitly turn them on...." You're no doubt familiar with using print() to display data on the console or to write it to a file. Perl 5.10 introduced the say() command which does the same thing but automatically adds a newline character to the output. It sounds like a small thing, but it's surprisingly useful. How many times do you print a line of data to a file and have to remember to explicitly add the newline? This just makes your life a little bit easier....

Some of the improvements were needed because in places Perl's Unix/C heritage shows through a little more than we'd like it to in the 21st century. One good example of this is bareword filehandles... It is a variable. And, worst than that, it's a package variable (which is the closest thing that Perl has to a global variable)... [But] for a long time (back to at least Perl 5.6), it has been possible to open filehandles and store them in lexical variables... For a long time, Perl's standard functions for dealing with dates and times were also very tied to its Unix roots. You may have seen code like this:

my @datetime = localtime();

The localtime() function returns a list of values that represent the various parts of the current local time... Since Perl 5.10, the standard library has included a module called Time::Piece. When you use Time::Piece in your code, it overrides localtime() and replaces it with a function that returns an object that contains details of the current time and date. That object has a strftime() method... And it also has several other methods for accessing information about the time and date [including a method called is_leap_year]... Using Time::Piece will almost certainly make your date and time handling code easier to write and (more importantly) easier to read and understand....

In most languages you'd have a list of variable names after the subroutine name and the parameters would be passed directly into those. Well, as of version 5.36 (which was released earlier this summer) Perl has that too. You turn the feature on with use feature 'signatures'.... Subroutine signatures have many other features. You can, for example, declare default values for parameters.
And new features possibly coming soon incude a new object-oriented programming framework named Corinna being written into the Perl core. "Beyond that, the Perl development team have their eye on a major version number bump."

And to avoid confusion with Raku -- the offshoot programming language formerly known as Perl 6 -- the next major version of Perl will be Perl 7.