Python knocked C++ out of the top 3 on TIOBE's index of the most popular programming languages this month, while C# rose into the #5 position, overtaking Visual Basic.

But the biggest surprise was when last month's #26 most popular programming language suddenly jumped six spots into the #20 position, writes the CEO of TIOBE Software. "At first sight this might seem a bit strange for a programming language that is designed to teach children how to program." But if you take into account that there are in total more than 50 million projects "written" in Scratch and each month 1 million new Scratch projects are added, it can't be denied any more that Scratch is popular...

Since computers are getting more and more an integral part of life, it is actually quite logical that languages to teach children programming are getting popular.
TIOBE notes that Scratch is sponsored by major tech companies like Google and Intel (as well as the Cartoon Network and LEGO Foundation). But Jaxenter also applauds how the Scratch interface lets users remix or comment on existing projects in addition to sharing their own: The community not only introduces children to teamwork, creative problem solving, logical thinking, and collaboration, but it also introduces concepts such as open source communities and code review. They will learn concepts that might later become useful in Agile software development and DevOps.
TIOBE bases its rankings on the number of search engine results for courses, third party vendors, and programmers -- making the programming news site DevClass wonders if the spike came from "school aged children...stuck at home while schools are closed."

TIOBE still shows Java as the #1 most popular programming language (followed by C, Python, and C++). And this month's index also shows PHP rising into the #9 position -- overtaking SQL.

And COBOL is now #26 on the list, making it more popular than Rust.

As millions file for unemployment benefits in the United States every week, states' aging computer systems simply cannot keep up. States like New Jersey and Connecticut have said they are desperate for programmers who are still familiar with COBOL, a programming language that debuted in 1960 and is still used in critical computer systems like unemployment databases and banks. But there aren't many who know COBOL programming anymore. IBM, the leading provider of mainframes typically used to compile and run COBOL code, is trying to help bridge that gap. From a report: On Friday, IBM announced it was launching a free training program to teach coders COBOL as well as new forums to match those who know the language with those who need help maintaining their critical systems. The COBOL course will teach coders how to use the language in Microsoft's popular VSCode software and will be available next week. Next month, IBM says it will release a more fully fledged video COBOL course on online learning platforms like Coursera. The two forums that IBM has launched live on the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe Project website. One of the forums, Calling all COBOL Programmers, has had dozens of engineers sign up in the last 24 hours from around the world. The other forum is more technical in nature, where coders can pose specific COBOL questions and work through projects with experts.

In New Jersey, the coronavirus outbreak has resulted in something that few people outside that state's tech department would have foreseen: a dire need for COBOL coders. From a report, shared by reader AmiMoJo: Standing for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL's day came and went long ago. It initially made a splash by giving coders a programming language that could work across the proprietary computers of multiple manufacturers. That was in the early 1960s. After becoming a staple of mainframes, it eventually came to represent dusty legacy code, including during the Y2K crisis 20 years ago. In New Jersey, experts are now needed to fix COBOL-based unemployment insurance systems -- more than four decades old -- that are overwhelmed due to pandemic-related job losses. At a press conference yesterday, governor Phil Murphy asked for the help of volunteer coders who still knew how to work in COBOL. Of course, as cyber-security expert Joseph Steinberg noted on his blog, such volunteers are likely well over 60 years old, making them especially vulnerable to Covid-19.

Here's some interesting thoughts from long-time Slashdot reader theodp: CNBC reports that the next frontier in the Microsoft, Google, Amazon cloud battle is over a world without code.

Google recently acquired no-code app development platform AppSheet, Microsoft just launched a new public preview of its low-code Power Apps mobile app for iOS and Android, and there is speculation about an 'Amazon for Everyone' product from AWS. "Anything a Java developer or engineer can build using custom code, we can do it 200 times faster," boasted Unqork CEO Gary Hoberman, whose no-code company raised $131 million in its latest funding round from investors that included Alphabet.

The promise of no-code development platforms has been touted for decades — is it different this time?

"In December, security researchers noticed an uptick in brute-force attacks against publicly exposed Microsoft SQL servers," reports CSOnline.

"It turns out the attacks go as far back as May 2018 and infect on average a couple thousand database servers every day with remote access Trojans and cryptominers."

Slashdot reader itwbennett writes: While the primary goal of the attack seems to be cryptocurrency mining, "what makes these database servers appealing for attackers apart from their valuable CPU power is the huge amount of data they hold," say researchers from Guardicore who investigated the attacks. The researchers also note that most machines (60%) stay infected only briefly, but "almost 20% of all breached servers remained infected for more than a week and even longer than two weeks," and 10% become reinfected...

[T]he attackers aggressively remove malware from competitors from targeted machines.
Many of the infected machines are located in America, India, South Korea, and Turkey, according to the article, which adds that the researchers traced the campaign back to China.

"The scans and attacks originate from Chinese IP addresses -- likely associated with infected and hijacked machines -- and the command-and-control servers are also hosted in China and use Chinese language for their web-based management interfaces."

"The Eclipse Foundation just released version 1.0 of an open-source alternative to Visual Studio Code called Eclipse Theia," reports SD Times: Theia is an extensible platform that allows developers to create multi-language cloud and desktop IDEs, allowing them to create entirely new developer experiences.

According to the Eclipse Foundation, the differences between Theia and Visual Studio Code are that Theia has a more modular architecture, Theia was designed from the ground to run on desktop and cloud, and Theia was developed under community-driven and vendor-neutral governance of the Eclipse Foundation. The Theia project was started by Ericsson and TypeFox in 2016, and since then it has become an integral part of cloud solutions globally. The project approached the Eclipse Foundation about becoming a potential host in 2019.

Early contributors to the project include ARM, Arduino, EclipseSource, Ericsson, Google Cloud, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, and TypeFox.
"We are thrilled to see Eclipse Theia deliver on its promise of providing a production-ready, vendor-neutral, and open source framework for creating custom and white-labeled developer products," announced Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director. "Visual Studio Code is one of the world's most popular development environments. Not only does Theia allow developers to install and reuse VS Code extensions, it provides an extensible and adaptable platform that can be tailored to specific use cases, which is a huge benefit for any organization that wants to deliver a modern and professional development experience. Congratulations to all the Theia committers and contributors on achieving this milestone."

InfoWorld points out that "thus far Theia is intended to be fitted into third-party products. An end-user version is on the roadmap for release later this year."

But programming columnist Mike Melanson notes that "Chances are, you've already run into Theia without even realizing it, as it already serves as the basis for Red Hat's CodeReady Workspaces, the Eclipse Foundation's own Eclipse Che, and Google Cloud Shell."

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has made the ACM Digital Library open access to help support the computing community during the coronavirus pandemic. Founded in 1947, the ACM is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society and publishes over 50 journals, including the prestigious Journal of the ACM, and two general magazines for computer professionals, Communications of the ACM and Queue.

"We believe that ACM can help support research, discovery and learning during this time of crisis by opening the ACM Digital Library to all," writes ACM President Cherri Pancake in a letter on ACM.org. "For the next three months, there will be no fees assessed for accessing or downloading work published by ACM. We hope this will help researchers, practitioners and students maintain access to our publications as well as increasing visibility and awareness of ACM's journals, proceedings and magazines."

The ACM DL will continue to be open through June 30, 2020. "This global health crisis is a unique challenge that has impacted many ACM members," adds Pancake. "We would like to express our concern and support for all who are affected by this outbreak."

The state of New York hopes to "amplify" its response to COVID-19 by launching tech-driven products with top companies, and it's looking for professional volunteers with experience in software development, hardware deployment/end-user support, and data science (as well as areas like product management, design, operations management).

Meanwhile, IBM's 2020 "Call for Code Global Challenge" is a virtual hackathon with a $200,000 prize, and they've now "expanded its focus" to include the effects of COVID-19.

Tech columnist Mike Melanson writes: But this is just the beginning of the COVID-19 hackathon boom, which now includes efforts organized by tech giants, state governments, and grassroots initiatives alike. For example, the World Health Organization got together with technology companies and platforms such as AWS, Facebook, Giphy, Microsoft, Pinterest, Salesforce, Slack, TikTok, Twitter and WeChat to launch the COVID-19 Global Hackathon 1.0, which is running as we speak with a deadline for submissions of March 30th at 9 AM PST. If you're too late, fret not, for there are many more, such as the CODEVID-19 hackathon we mentioned last week that has a weekly rolling deadline. And deadlines aside, the U.S. Digital Response for COVID-19 is working to pair technology, data, and government professionals with those who need them, in a form of nationwide, technological mutual aid...

[T]he COVID-19 open-source help desk is "a fast-track 'stack overflow' where you can get answers from the very people who wrote the software that you use or who are experts in its use." And if you happen to be either an open source author or expert, feel free to pitch in on answering questions...

On the open data side of things, for example, GitHub offers a guide on open collaboration on COVID-19, while StackOverflow looks at the myriad ways to help the fight against COVID-19 from home. ProgrammableWeb has a list of developer hackathons to combat COVID-19, and even the Golang team offers some guidance for Go, the Go community, and the pandemic, with Erlang also joining in.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google paused Chrome updates last week when it canceled the Chrome 81 release in order to avoid causing severe disruptions to web developers, system administrators, and its own engineers, most working from home or having resources strained due to ever-worsening coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. In a blog post on the Chrome blog today, Google said it is now ready to resume work on Chrome. The company said that starting next week, the current Chrome 80 release will start receiving security updates once again. Chrome v81, initially scheduled to be released on March 17, was rescheduled for April 7, at which time, web developers and system administrators would have had the time to adapt to their new working conditions.

Video-game fans suddenly have their pick of a huge menu of titles thanks to a raft of new mobile subscription services from Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and Nvidia. But for the more than 1 billion users of Apple's iPhone and iPad, the only real option is Arcade, the subscription service launched by the company in September. From a report: That's because Apple imposes strict limits on the kinds of apps users can access on its devices. For example, App Store guidelines ban services that rely on streaming from the cloud. Arcade adheres to the requirements, in part, because it's included as a feature within the App Store itself. This is the latest example of what critics say are arbitrary rules favoring Apple's own apps at the expense of similar software from outside developers. "There's a fraught relationship between developers and Apple precisely because of rules like this," said David Barnard, a longtime independent developer and advocate at RevenueCat. "In some ways, I am incredibly grateful to their marketplace for helping me make millions of dollars I wouldn't have made without it. On the flip side, them being so heavy handed at times does kill apps and does cause developers to miss out on other potential revenue." If software developers want to reach as many consumers as possible, they have to be on Apple's iOS. The operating system powers more than 1 billion smartphones and tablets and it's the only way to access the iOS App Store, which accounted for 65% of app spending globally last year, according to Sensor Tower. The Cupertino, California-based company can also make or break mobile gaming businesses: More than half of the $62 billion spent on smartphone gaming last year happened on Apple products.

Java "remains the world's most popular programming language," notes ZDNet, reporting on Oracle's release this week of Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, Oracle's "reference implementation of the Java 14 programming language spec." Rolling out in line with Oracle's six-monthly release schedule that began with Java 9 in 2017, JDK 14 includes enhancements that Oracle says will improve developer productivity... According to Georges Saab, Oracle vice president of development for the Java Platform, the faster six-monthly releases are helping developers adopt new features more rapidly due to regular expected changes. Java 9, for example, was released more than three years after Java 8...

Saab notes that major improvements in JDK 14 include a Foreign-Memory Access API enhancement (JEP 370), and improvements from Project Amber, another OpenJDK project, including Pattern Matching (JEP 305) and a preview of Records (JEP 359). Oracle JDK 14 will receive at least two quarterly updates in line with Oracle's critical-patch update schedule before Java 15 is released in September 2020.

Oracle is providing Java 14 as the Oracle OpenJDK release under an open-source GNU General Public License v2. It's also released under a commercial license using Oracle JDK. Most of the nearly 2,000 fixes in JDK 14 have been made by Oracle employees while 528 came from individual developers and other organizations. Some of the main contributors included Red Hat, SAP, Google, Arm, Intel, and NTT Data.

An anonymous reader quotes the Dev newsletter from Inside.com: The U.S. Supreme Court has postponed hearing oral arguments in the Google vs. Oracle copyright case and all other cases because of the coronavirus. It is the first time the Supreme Court has done so since the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. ["The Court also shortened its argument calendars in August 1793 and August 1798 in response to yellow fever outbreaks," the announcement points out.]

"The court will examine the options for rescheduling those cases in due course in light of the developing circumstances," the announcement added.

Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court were scheduled to hear oral arguments in the Google vs. Oracle case on Tuesday, March 24, 2020, before making a decision a few months later.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Repair specialist iFixit is building a database filled with repair information for the world's hospital equipment in anticipation of the increased demand caused by COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. In particular, it's calling for repair manuals for ventilators and BiPAP machines that can be used as ventilators. iFixit's database can be found here, and the company is calling for people to create new device pages and upload photographs and manuals.

There are currently few sources for repair manuals online. iFixit notes that resources like Frank's Hospital Workshop exist, but these are relatively small operations. Some manufacturers provide easy access to repair manuals on their websites, but others make them harder to find. There are a few different parts to iFixit's campaign beyond assembling a collection of manuals. Once it's got a manual, the company wants to format its information to make it as easy to understand as possible. It plans to break the manuals down into guides for individual repairs, to reformat them to make them more SEO-friendly, and to translate them into other languages. iFixit also wants to put together preventive maintenance guides so technicians can work to keep their equipment in good working order before it reaches the point of breaking down. iFixit is also asking people in the medical community "to provide information about which ventilators are currently in use as well as which parts are most likely to break," the report adds. If you have any manuals to contribute, you can upload them to iFixit directly or email the company.

theodp writes: In a Medium post, tech-backed Code.org explains how it will be supporting our community during school closures, which includes "a major investment in online education without an in-person instructor" and other offerings. From the signup form for Code Break: "With schools closed and tens of millions of students at home, Code.org is launching Code Break -- a live weekly webcast where our team will teach your children [K-12 computer science] at home while school is closed, and a weekly challenge to engage students of all abilities, even those without computers. [...] Computer science is foundational to all fields of study, but since many schools don't offer it yet, this could be a unique chance to support your child in a fun new learning opportunity."

Interestingly, Code.org will be competing with its own corporate donors for homebound kids' attention. Microsoft is offering limited-time free Minecraft: Education Edition licenses as its way "to help teachers and students stay connected to the classroom" during school closures. And Google has come up with a curated list of distance learning resources for schools affected by COVID-19 (think Google Hangouts and Chromebooks), as has Facebook for Education ("If school is closed, Messenger Kids is a way to continue the social interactions the students might have at school"). Amazon is also pitching CS study for homebound kids: "As classrooms across the U.S. experience educational disruption during the pandemic, Amazon Future Engineer will initially provide free access to our sponsored computer science courses in the United States [thru Aug. 31]. These courses are for independent learners from 6th to 12th grade, or teachers who are teaching remotely to this age group."

The Steam Game Festival is returning for a spring edition starting today, featuring more than 40 indie games you can preview with free-to-play demos. The Verge reports: Geoff Keighley, The Game Awards executive producer and host, first announced the event yesterday on Twitter, saying it was put together to help feature games from indie developers who lost the opportunity to demo their titles at the now-canceled GDC, which was to take place this week in San Francisco. The Steam Game Festival will run from March 18th to March 23rd. The collection features games from a number of the more well-known indie demo day events, many of which participate every year at GDC. That includes Indie MegaBooth and The Mix, as well as smaller events like Day of the Devs and Wings Fund.

Google said today it is pausing upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. From a report: The company cited "adjusted work schedules" as the primary reason for the delay, as most of its engineers are now working from home. The company published an official statement today after ZDNet reached out for comment last night, when Google failed to release Chrome v81. YouTube videos, tweets, and blog posts announcing the new Chrome release were posted online yesterday -- most likely scheduled days or weeks in advance. However, the actual Chrome v81 release never made it to users' devices, and the same videos, tweets, and blog posts were removed shortly after Google's PR realized their mistake.

Nat Friedman: npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Together, they've helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world. We at GitHub are honored to be part of the next chapter of npm's story and to help npm continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community.

Ars Technica's senior tech reporter took a long long at Google's reimplementation of Java in Android -- and the lawsuit filed against it by Oracle in 2010. And he discovers "a possible downside" to Oracle's stance on API copyrights. If anyone should understand the importance of such copying, it's Oracle. After all, Oracle got its start in the 1970s selling a database product based on the then-new structured query language (SQL). SQL was invented by IBM. And Oracle doesn't seem to have gotten a license to use it...

Oracle's copying of SQL seems pretty similar to Google's copying of Java. But an Oracle spokeswoman disagrees. "It's an incorrect premise, comparing apples with broccoli, and being completely divorced from the facts of the case," she wrote in a Tuesday email.

America's Supreme Court will soon decide whether Google infringed on a copyright that Oracle says it holds on the APIs of Java. But this week Oracle's executive vice president also wrote a blog post arguing that Google "sought the support of outside groups to bolster its position" by using friend-of-the-court briefs to "create the impression that this case is of great import and controversy, and a ruling in Oracle's favor will impede innovation."

"Upon closer inspection, what these briefs reveal is a significantly different picture, one where Google is the outlier, with very little meaningful support outside the purview of its financial fingerprints." As we discussed in a previous post, this case is not about innovation, it is about theft. Google copied verbatim more than 11,000 lines of software code, and now attempts post hoc to change the rules in order to excuse its conduct... As those of us that have watched Google over the past few decades know, Google's view boils down to the self-absorbed position that the work it is doing is of such consequence that the rules shouldn't apply to them. The problem for Google is that very few outside of its self-generated atmosphere agree.

Let's be clear, it is not commonplace or foundational in the software industry to steal other developer's software code. Rather, what is commonplace is a confluence of interests where code is licensed to facilitate its widespread deployment, with the owner choosing the terms... Java embraced choice, with three different licensing alternatives, including a freely deployed open source license, and a commercial license designed to maintain interoperability. And it turns out that nobody except Google found it necessary to steal despite Java's enormous popularity. It is not in dispute in this matter that Google destroyed Java interoperability so it is unbelievable that many of its amici take the position that Google needs to prevail in order to protect interoperability...

Out of 26 briefs, we found:

- 7 briefs representing 13 entities that received "substantial contributions" from Google;

- 8 briefs filed by entities or individuals that have financial ties to Google through grants, dues, cy pres settlement proceeds or employment of individual amici;

- 2 briefs filed by companies with a clear commercial interest in Google prevailing;

- 1 brief filed by several former U.S. government employees all of whom worked for a small government agency run by a former Google executive, despite the U.S. government itself filing a brief in favor of Oracle;

- 4 separate briefs representing a total of 7 individuals;

- A few other briefs where Google financial ties are likely;

- 1 brief submitted by a serial copyright infringer repeatedly sanctioned by the Courts;

What masqueraded as a mass show of support for Google, may not be much more than an exercise in transactional interests.
The groups Oracle is criticizing include the American Library Association, EFF, and the Python Software Foundation, as well as a brief by 83 computer scientists which included Doug Lea, a former memeber of the executive committee of the Java Community Process. Oracle's blog post also makes the argument that besides Microsoft and IBM, "not a single brief from the other 98 of the Top 100 tech companies was filed."

There was a response on Twitter from Joshua Bloch, who worked on the Java platform at Sun before leaving in 2004 to become Google's chief Java architect for the next 8 years. He called Oracle's blog post "nonsense." For example, Doug Lea -- who is in no small measure responsible for Java's success -- accepted one small grant from Google fourteen years ago, and promptly doled it out to deserving undergrads who were testing java.util.concurrent. Have you no shame, Oracle?

We are not Google shills. We are scientists and engineers. Some of us laid the theoretical groundwork for the profession, some designed the computers you grew up on, and some wrote the software you use every day.

We depend on the right to reimplement each others' APIs, and we are truly afraid that your irresponsible lawsuit may deprive us of that right, which we've enjoyed throughout our long careers.

The tech jobs marketplace at Hired.com crunched their data on more than 400,000 interview requests and job offers over the last year to produce their annual "State of Software Engineers" report. Among its surprising insights: software engineers with more than 10 years of experience get 20% fewere interview requests than engineers with 4 to 10 years of experience.

Other insights: Demand for AR/VR talent is up by 1400%, mirroring blockchain's 517% demand growth last year... In large U.S. tech hubs AR/VR engineer salaries range from $135k - $150k... 46% of software engineers rank AR/VR as one of the top 3 technologies they'd like to learn in 2020... If you work in AR/VR, you may want to move to San Francisco, where they pay $150k/year on average.
The next-highest growth in demand came for "gaming engineers" and "computer vision engineers" -- with both positions seeing a 146% increase in demand over 2018. The next-highest demand growth was for "search engineers" (increasing 137%) and for "machine learning engineers" (increasing 89%). Demand for "blockchain engineers" increased by just 9%.

But they also report that demand for frontend and backend engineers "grew steadily by 17%, which shows that all companies -- not just Silicon Valley tech giants -- are evolving into being tech companies..." The worldwide process of digital transformation, while something of a buzzword, reflects a critical truth: every company is now a technology company. Whether the company is Bank of America, Alaska Airlines, Sainsbury's, or Tesla, investment in top software engineering talent isn't a future ambition, it's a matter of survival.
And the #1 most-desired coding skill was Go (for the second year in a row), "garnering an average of 9.2 interview requests for every Go-skilled candidate..." But there may be a larger trend. All told, the number of interview requests across all languages remained nearly constant year-over-year, with only minor fluctuations in average requests, and zero change in how each language ranked against others. This could suggest that supply for these skills has not yet caught up with demand...

According to Robert Half, 67% of IT managers plan to expand their teams in areas such as security, cloud computing and business intelligence, but 89% reported challenges in recruiting that talent. Those challenges in hiring are even greater for roles related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, and blockchain.
Their analysis concludes the most in-demand programming languages are Go, Scala, Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin, Objective C, JavaScript, Swift, PHP, Java, HTML, and then Python -- though Python, JavaScript, and Java are engineers' favorite coding languages, "largely because of their useful and well-maintained libraries and packages..."

"Ruby, PHP and Objective C are ranked the least favorite (and least fun) languages for software engineers."