An anonymous reader writes: TED Conferences has its own educational YouTube channel (now with 10 million subscribers and over 1.5 billion views). Two weeks ago it launched a 10-episode animated series about computer programming, and its first episode -- The Prison Break -- has already been viewed nearly a quarter of a milllion times.

In the 7-minute video, a programmer wakes up in a prison cell -- with total amnesia -- and discovers a "mysterious stranger" squeezing through the jail cell's bars. It's a floating anthropomorphic drone, saying it needs the programmer's help to rescue a dystopian future world "in turmoil. Robots have taken over." The video introduces the computer programming concept of a loop -- since escaping the jail cell involves testing a key in every possible position. And the video's page on the TED-Ed web site offers links to related resources from Code.org and Free Code Camp, as well as from Advent of Code, "which is run by Eric Wastl, who consulted extensively on Think Like a Coder and inspired quite a few of the puzzles."

The episode ends with the programmer dangling from the flying drone, off on an attempt to recover three artifacts -- nodes of memory, power, and creation -- that are currently being used for "nefarious purposes."

Long-time Slashdot reader hondo77 notes that Larry Wall has given his approval to the re-naming of Perl 6.

In the "Path to Raku" pull request, Larry Wall indicated his approval, leaving this comment: I am in favor of this change, because it reflects an ancient wisdom:

"No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved."
"Perl 6 will become Raku, assuming the four people who haven't yet approved the pull request give their okay," reports the Register, adding that Perl 5 will then become simply Perl.

Dozens of comments on that pull request have now already been marked as "outdated," and while a few contributors have made a point of abstaining from the approval process, reviewer Alex Daniel notes that "this pull request will be merged on October 14th if nobody in the list rejects it or requests more changes."

Over 100 published studies may have incorrect results thanks to a glitchy piece of Python code discovered by researchers at the University of Hawaii.

An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard: The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, on Tuesday in the journal Organic Letters.

"This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned," the new paper reads. "Authors who used these scripts should certainly double-check their results and any relevant conclusions using the modified scripts in the [supplementary information]."

Yuheng Luo, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, discovered the glitch this summer when he was verifying the results of research conducted by chemistry professor Philip Williams on cyanobacteria... Under supervision of University of Hawaii at Manoa assistant chemistry professor Rui Sun, Luo used a script written in Python that was published as part of a 2014 paper by Patrick Willoughby, Matthew Jansma, and Thomas Hoye in the journal Nature Protocols . The code computes chemical shift values for NMR, or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a common technique used by chemists to determine the molecular make-up of a sample. Luo's results did not match up with the NMR values that Williams' group had previously calculated, and according to Sun, when his students ran the code on their computers, they realized that different operating systems were producing different results.

Sun then adjusted the code to fix the glitch, which had to do with how different operating systems sort files.
The researcher who wrote the flawed script told Motherboard that the new study was "a beautiful example of science working to advance the work we reported in 2014. They did a tremendous service to the community in figuring this out."

Sun described the original authors as "very gracious," saying they encouraged the publication of the findings.

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman explained why the company plans to renew a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), even though he and others at GitHub oppose ICE's policy of separating children from parents at the border, Motherboard reported on Wednesday, citing an internal GitHub email. From a report: The email shows the continuing debate within the tech industry about whether companies should work specifically with ICE, and comes as a host of other companies have dealt with employee protests over corporate involvement with ICE. "In August, the GitHub leadership team learned about a pending renewal of our product by the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Since then, we have been talking with people throughout the company, based on our own personal concerns and those raised by Hubbers," Friedman's email reads, referring to GitHub employees. Evan Greer, deputy director at activism group Fight for the Future tweeted a copy of the email on Tuesday. Motherboard also separately obtained a copy of the email from a source inside GitHub. The product up for renewal is a license of GitHub Enterprise Server, an on-premises deployment of GitHub that customers can run on their own server, according to the email. ICE originally bought a license in April, 2016.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Some of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's electronic surveillance activities violated the constitutional privacy rights of Americans swept up in a controversial foreign intelligence program (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), a secretive surveillance court has ruled. The ruling deals a rare rebuke to U.S. spying activities that have generally withstood legal challenge or review. The intelligence community disclosed Tuesday that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last year found that the FBI's pursuit of data about Americans ensnared in a warrantless internet-surveillance program intended to target foreign suspects may have violated the law authorizing the program, as well as the Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

The court concluded that the FBI had been improperly searching a database of raw intelligence for information on Americans -- raising concerns about oversight of the program, which as a spy program operates in near total secrecy. The court ruling identifies tens of thousands of improper searches of raw intelligence databases by the bureau in 2017 and 2018 that it deemed improper in part because they involved data related to tens of thousands of emails or telephone numbers -- in one case, suggesting that the FBI was using the intelligence information to vet its personnel and cooperating sources. Federal law requires that the database only be searched by the FBI as part of seeking evidence of a crime or for foreign intelligence information. In other cases, the court ruling reveals improper use of the database by individuals. In one case, an FBI contractor ran a query of an intelligence database -- searching information on himself, other FBI personnel and his relatives, the court revealed. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said that the Trump administration failed to persuasively argue that the bureau would not be able to properly tackle national security threats if the program was altered to better protect citizen privacy.

Last year, Apple software chief Craig Federighi said developers would be able to easily bring their iPad apps to Mac computers, essentially letting coders write an app once and deploy it across millions more devices. So far, the reality has fallen short for some developers and is even leaving consumers paying twice for apps. From a report: Major app developers and service providers like Netflix are also demurring on taking part, at least at this early stage. Apple rolled out Catalyst, the technology to transition iPad apps into Mac versions, on Monday. It's the initial step toward a bigger goal: By 2021, developers should be able to build an app once and have it work on iPhones, iPads and Mac computers through a single, unified App Store. But the first iteration, which appears to still be quite raw and in a number of ways frustrating to developers, risks upsetting users who may have to pay again when they download the Mac version of an iPad app they've already bought.

"As a user, I don't want to pay again just to have the same app," said longtime Apple developer Steven Troughton-Smith. "As a developer, I don't want my users to have to make that decision." James Thompson has had to work harder than he expected to get his popular PCalc calculator iPad app running well on Mac computers. Getting paid a second time for that extra work makes sense for developers, but consumers may not immediately understand that after Apple made the porting process sound as easy as checking a box, he said. Kevin Reutter, who has brought his Planny app to Mac computers, called the situation "sad."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference, I talked to Linus Torvalds and several other of the Linux kernel's top programmers. They universally agreed Microsoft wants to control Linux, but they're not worried about it. That's because Linux, by its very nature and its GPL2 open-source licensing, can't be controlled by any single third-party. Torvalds said: "The whole anti-Microsoft thing was sometimes funny as a joke, but not really. Today, they're actually much friendlier. I talk to Microsoft engineers at various conferences, and I feel like, yes, they have changed, and the engineers are happy. And they're like really happy working on Linux. So I completely dismissed all the anti-Microsoft stuff."

But that doesn't mean the Microsoft leopard can't change its spots. Sure, he hears, "This is the old Microsoft, and they're just biding their time." But, Torvalds said, "I don't think that's true. I mean, there will be tension. But that's true with any company that comes into Linux; they have their own objectives. And they want to do things their way because they have a reason for it." So, with Linux, "Microsoft tends to be mainly about Azure and doing all the stuff to make Linux work well for them," he explained. Torvalds emphasized this is normal: "I mean, that's just being part of the community." James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and top Linux kernel developer, sees Microsoft as going through the same process as all other corporate Linux supporters: "This is a thread that runs through Linux. You can't work on the kernel to your own proprietary advantage. A lot of companies, as they came in with the proprietary business model, assumed they could. They have to be persuaded that, if you want something in Linux, that will assist your business -- absolutely fine. But it has to go through an open development process. And if someone else finds it useful, you end up cooperating or collaborating with them to produce this feature." That means, to get things done, even Microsoft is "eventually forced to collaborate with others."

Bottomley concluded: "So it doesn't matter if Microsoft has a competing agenda to Red Hat or IBM or anybody else. Developers are still expected to work together in the Linux kernel with a transparent agenda."

The Transaction Processing Performance Council is a many-decades-old nonprofit that defines transaction processing and database benchmarks and shares its performance results with the industry.

Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear says they've just released some surprising news: The TPC organization reported on October 5 that OceanBase, an open-source relational database from Ant Financial, a business unit of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has topped the TPC-C benchmark, more than doubling the score achieved by Oracle Corp. which had held the world record for the past 9 years.

OceanBase v2.2 Enterprise Edition with Partitioning scored at 60,880,800, while Oracle Database 11g R2 Enterprise Edition w/RAC and Partitioning achieved 30,249,688.

TPC Benchmark C is industrial standard OLTP benchmark, measuring on-line transactions per minute (tpmC).

Dave Knott writes: A Montreal legal firm has requested authorization to launch a class-action lawsuit against Epic Games, makers of the widely-popular video game Fortnite. The legal notice, filed on behalf of two minors, likens the effect of the game to cocaine, saying it releases the chemical dopamine to the brain of vulnerable young people who can become dependent on playing. Much of the suit is based on a 2015 Quebec Superior Court ruling that determined tobacco companies didn't warn their customers about the dangers of smoking. Jean-Philippe Caron, a lawyer at Calex, said the firm was contacted by several parents whose kids had become addicted to the game.

Last year, the World Health Organization classified addiction to video games as a disease. It defined the disorder as "a pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control over gaming, increased priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences." According to Caron, Fortnite was designed by psychologists to make it more addictive. "They knew that their game was very attractive, yet they did not divulge the risks to the population. It's a little like tobacco."

Apple said it will ease some restrictions on developers of third-party apps, responding to news reports about the rise of in-house software that gets prized default status on iPhones and iPads. From a report: The Cupertino, California-based company plans to release a software update later this year that will help outside messaging applications work better with the Siri digital assistant. Right now, when iPhone users ask Siri to call or message a friend, the system defaults to Apple's Phone or iMessage apps. If you want to use WhatsApp or Skype, you have to specifically say that.

When the software refresh kicks in, Siri will default to the apps that people use frequently to communicate with their contacts. For example, if an iPhone user always messages another person via WhatsApp, Siri will automatically launch WhatsApp, rather than iMessage. It will decide which service to use based on interactions with specific contacts. Developers will need to enable the new Siri functionality in their apps. This will be expanded later to phone apps for calls as well.

theodp writes: On Friday, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced $123 million in new Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant awards to 41 school districts, nonprofits and state educational agencies. Over $78 million of that went to 29 grantees focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education, and more than 85% of the funded STEM projects include a specific focus on computer science. The announcement was scant on details, but the awardees listed include tech-bankrolled Code.org, whose Board of Directors include Microsoft President Brad Smith, Amazon CEO of Worldwide Consumer Jeff Wilke, and Google VP of Education & University Programs Maggie Johnson. In his new book, Tools and Weapons, Smith interestingly reveals how Microsoft, Amazon, and Google each pledged to commit $50 million to K-12 computer science education to get First Daughter and Presidential Adviser Ivanka Trump to work to secure $1 billion of Federal support for K-12 STEM/CS education.

From the book: "While you would be hard-pressed to say that every student must take computer science, you could say that every student deserves the opportunity. That means getting computer science into every high school, and into earlier grades as well. The only way to train teachers at this scale is for federal funding to help fill the gap. After years of lobbying, there was a breakthrough in federal interest in 2016. In January President Obama announced a bold proposal to invest $4 billion of federal money to bring computer science to the nation's schools. While the proposal produced enthusiasm, it didn't spur Congress to appropriate any new money. Ivanka Trump had more success the following year. Even before her father had moved into the White House, she was interested in federal investments in computer science in schools. She was confident she could persuade the president to support the idea, but she also believed that the key to public money was to secure substantial private funding from major technology companies. She said she would work to secure $1 billion of federal support over five years if the tech sector would pledge $300 million during the same time. As always, there was the question of whether someone would go first. The White House was looking for a company to get things rolling by pledging $50 million over five years. Given Microsoft's long-standing involvement, financial support, and prior advocacy with the Obama White House, we were a natural choice. We agreed to make the commitment, other companies followed, and in September 2017 Mary Snapp, the head of Microsoft Philanthropies, joined Ivanka in Detroit to make the announcement."

The $300 million was apparently money well-pledged. Surrounded by children, educators, Ivanka Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, President Trump in late 2017 signed a presidential memorandum directed to DeVos calling for the expansion of K-12 computer science and STEM education in the U.S. with at least $200 million in annual grant funding.

Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: Last week, the Solicitor General of the White House weighed in on Google's request for the Supreme Court to overturn the Federal Circuit's ridiculously confused ruling in the Oracle/Google case concerning the copyrightability of APIs (and whether or not repurposing them is fair use). Not surprisingly, as the Solicitor General has been siding with Oracle all along, it suggests that the Supreme Court not hear the case. Of course, it does so by completely misrepresenting what's at stake in the case -- pretending that this is about whether or not software source code is copyright-eligible:

"This case concerns the copyrightability of computer code. To induce a computer to perform a function, a person must give the computer written instructions. Typically, those instructions are written in 'source code,' which consists of words, numbers, and symbols in a particular 'programming language,' which has its own syntax and semantics. The source code is then converted into binary 'object code' -- ones and zeros -- that is readable by the computer.

It is both 'firmly established' and undisputed in this case that computer code can be copyrightable as a 'literary work[].' 1 Melville B. Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright & 2A.10[B] (2019). Section 101 defines a 'computer program' as 'a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result.' 17 U.S.C. 101. And various Copyright Act provisions recognize that a person may own a copyright in a 'computer program.'"

Masnick adds: Except... that's not what this case is about. Even remotely. Literally no one denies that software source code is subject to copyright. The question is whether or not an Application Programming Interface -- an API -- is subject to copyright.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Microsoft has launched a new 44-part series called Python for Beginners on YouTube, consisting of three- to four-minute lessons from two self-described geeks at Microsoft who love programming and teaching.

The course isn't quite for total beginners as it assumes people have done a little programming in JavaScript or played around with the MIT-developed Scratch visual programming language aimed at kids. But it could help beginners kick-start ambitions to build machine-learning apps, web applications, or automate processes on a desktop.... It has published a page on GitHub containing additional resources, including slides and code samples to help students become better at Python.

"It's that time of year again when we come together to support and celebrate the open source technologies we use and love," announces a post on Digital Ocean's blog. Hacktoberfest is a monthlong celebration of open source software. It was started at DigitalOcean as a way to foster a sense of community and encourage more participation in open source projects. To reward Hacktoberfest contributors, we've designed a limited edition T-shirt for those who complete the challenge each year. This year, the first 50,000 participants will be eligible to receive the limited edition shirt...

One of the enticing elements of this celebration is that you don't have to leave the comfort of your office or home to participate. But each year, more and more Hacktoberfest events have been organized since we introduced the Event Kit. In 2018 alone, there were 251 Hacktoberfest events. All of these took place during October and happened in 50 countries. With October five days away, we're already expecting to exceed last year's number of events! Wow... if you're in or around New York City, we invite you to join us at the Hacktoberfest kickoff celebration at the DigitalOcean headquarters...

This year, we're also hoping to drive awareness of the negative impacts many people around the world are experiencing due to the many environmental crises we're faced with -- and encourage participation in projects that are targeting these causes. We've identified a handful of projects on GitHub that focus on supporting the environment, which you can find in our Climate section. We hope you'll consider contributing to some of the impactful work being done by activists, scientists, and mission-driven organizations around the globe... Let's join forces to make a difference!
Last year's Hacktoberfest saw 401,231 pull requests on GitHub, according to the blog post.

Matthew Garrett is a security developer at Google and a Linux contributor who in 2014 won the Free Software Foundation's annual "Advancement of Free Software" award. But now he's asking if we need to re-think what free software is: If users can pay Amazon to provide a hosted version of a piece of software, there's little incentive for them to pay the authors of that software. This has led to various projects adopting license terms such as the Commons Clause that effectively make it nonviable to provide such a service, forcing providers to pay for a commercial use license instead. In general the entities pushing for these licenses are VC backed companies who are themselves benefiting from free software written by volunteers that they give nothing back to, so I have very little sympathy. But it does raise a larger issue -- how do we ensure that production of free software isn't just a mechanism for the transformation of unpaid labour into corporate profit...?

At the same time, people are spending more time considering some of the other ethical outcomes of free software. Copyleft ensures that you can share your code with your neighbour without your neighbour being able to deny the same freedom to others, but it does nothing to prevent your neighbour using your code to deny other fundamental, non-software, freedoms. As governments make more and more use of technology to perform acts of mass surveillance, detention, and even genocide, software authors may feel legitimately appalled at the idea that they are helping enable this by allowing their software to be used for any purpose. The JSON license includes a requirement that "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil", but the lack of any meaningful clarity around what "Good" and "Evil" actually mean makes it hard to determine whether it achieved its aims.

As stewards of the free software definition, the Free Software Foundation should be taking the lead in ensuring that these issues are discussed. The priority of the board right now should be to restructure itself to ensure that it can legitimately claim to represent the community and play the leadership role it's been failing to in recent years, otherwise the opportunity will be lost and much of the activist energy that underpins free software will be spent elsewhere. If free software is going to maintain relevance, it needs to continue to explain how it interacts with contemporary social issues. If any organisation is going to claim to lead the community, it needs to be doing that.

OneHundredAndTen writes: According to this Forbes article, the Pentagon is worried that many in the USA's military nerve center claim to use Agile methods, when in fact, they aren't. Those responsible for these things at the Pentagon have therefore come up with a Detecting Agile BS document, so people can tell when they are doing Agile vs. when they are doing BS Agile. The implicit conclusion seems to be the usual "if it doesn't work for you, you are not doing it right."
The article was written by the author of The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done, a 2018 book arguing "An unstoppable business revolution is under way -- and it is Agile. Companies that embrace Agile Management learn to connect everyone and everything...all the time. They can deliver instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale." The book's author is Stephen Denning, who spent four years as Program Director of Knowledge Management during his decades of management at the World Bank.

His Forbes article this week warns "effective software development at DoD is not just a narrow issue affecting a few software developers. Questions of national cyber security and the integrity of the upcoming U.S. presidential election may depend on it... Fresh thinking and Agile mindsets are urgently needed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released new rules yesterday governing when police can use genetic genealogy to track down suspects in serious crimes -- the first-ever policy covering how these databases, popular among amateur genealogists, should be used in law enforcement attempts to balance public safety and privacy concerns. The DOJ interim policy, which takes effect on 1 November, is intended to "balance the Department's relentless commitment to solving violent crime and protecting public safety against equally important public interests," such as privacy and civil liberties, a press release states. The policy says "forensic genetic genealogy" should generally be used only for violent crimes such as murder and rape, as well as to identify human remains. (The policy permits broader use if the ancestry database's policy allows such searches.) Police should first exhaust traditional crime solving methods, including searching their own criminal DNA databases.

Under the new policy, police can't quietly upload a fake profile to a genealogy website, as some have done in hopes of finding a suspect's distant relatives, without first identifying themselves. And the site itself must have informed its users that law enforcement agencies may search their data. The policy also bars police from using a suspect's DNA profile to look for genes related to disease risks or psychological traits. Another provision attempts to limit situations in which police secretly take a DNA sample from a suspect's relative -- from a discarded cup or tissue, for example -- to help home in on a suspect. The policy says the person must give their informed consent unless police have obtained a search warrant.

Developer Riley Testut is launching an alternative to Apple's App Store, called AltStore, that theoretically lets you "push the boundaries" of iOS without either jailbreaking or worrying that Apple will pull access. Engadget reports: AltStore works by fooling your device into believing that you're a developer sideloading test apps. It uses an app on your Mac or Windows PC to re-sign apps every seven days, using iTunes' WiFi syncing framework to reinstall them on your device before they expire. You only need a free Apple ID (a throwaway will do) to install apps that Apple would never allow, such as Testut's Delta emulator for Nintendo consoles.

In theory, there's not much Apple can do to easily shut things down. It could take down individual accounts, but you could just create another Apple ID if needed. Also, iOS only looks for an excessive number of app provisioning profiles, not the number of apps you have installed. So long as AltStore manages those profiles, Apple doesn't know if you're running one app or twenty. Testut told The Verge that measures to block AltStore would break key functionality for developers or iTunes syncing. AltStore is available in preview form now, with a formal launch due on September 28th. "People who back Testut's Patreon will also have the option to install almost any app, not just those in the store," the report adds.

wired_parrot shares a report from the BBC: Released in 1982, Entombed was far from a best-seller and today it's largely forgotten. But recently, a computer scientist and a digital archaeologist decided to pull apart the game's source code to investigate how it was made. An early maze-navigating game, Entombed intrigued the researchers for how early programmers solved the problem of drawing a solvable maze that is drawn procedurally. But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn't explain (Link to full paper). The fundamental logic that determines how the maze is drawn is locked in a table of possible values written in the games code. However, it seems the logic behind the table has been lost forever.

This week Stack Overflow's CEO/founder Joel Spolsky spoke to Clive Thompson, the tech journalist who just published the new book Coders: the Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World . "It's a sort of ethnographic history of this particular tribe," explains a blog post at Stack Overflow, "examining how software developers fit into the world of business and culture and how their role in society has shifted in recent decades.

"The official conversation kicked off after a 15-minute tangent on Joel's collection of Omni magazine and the formative role this publication had for both men." Some excerpts: Clive: The question in my mind is, who is interested in this? What gets them bit by the bug so they are willing to crawl over all the broken glass that is the daily work.

Joel: In my time, it was the absolute control. Whatever code you wrote, that's what executed. There was no translation. It wasn't like, well the flour was kind of old, and I tried to make the souffle but it collapsed. Unlike so many things you will try to accomplish as a child or an adult, where you work on something but it doesn't turn out as you expect it to, with code it will do exactly what you told it. Even if that's not what you meant. You might suddenly realize you're obeying me to the point of making me angry.

Clive: The monkey's paw thing. I shouldn't have wished for that.

Joel: But the computer is still being completely obedient.

Clive: That thrill is a common thread I found in my research, from the 1960s through today. I will talk to people in their 80s who worked on machines the size of an entire room, and it's the same damn thing talking to a 15-year-old girl at an afterschool program working on a raspberry pi or P5. There is something unique about the micro-world that is inside the machine, qualitatively different from our real world.

Joel: It's sort of utopian. Things behave as they are supposed to. The reason I put a question mark on that, as programmers move higher and higher up the abstraction tree, that kinda goes away.

Clive: I think the rise of machine learning is an interesting challenge to the traditional craft of software development. Some of the people I spoke with for the book aren't interested in it because they don't like the idea of working with these indeterminate training systems... there is something unsettling about not really knowing what's going on with what you're building.

Joel: I just picked up Arduino a year ago and that was enormously fun because it was like going back to C, instead of all these fancy high-level languages where you don't know what they are going to do. It offered a really detailed level of control. If something doesn't work, you can figure it out, because everything is tractable.
They also discussed the future of coding -- and took a fond look back at its past. Spolsky remembers his first exposure to computers was an interactive terminal system connected to a mainframe that ran FORTRAN, BASIC, and PL/I programs. "Many, many years later I realized there was no way they had enough memory for three compilers and in fact what they had was a very simple pre-processsor that made Basic, FORTRAN, and PL/I all look like the same mush.

"It was a very crappy subset of each of those three languages."