Google's previewing something new in the SDK for their Dart programming language: machine learning-powered automatic code completion.

ZDNet reports: ML Complete works with the editor to offer developers completions as they type their code. It's also meant to help developers quickly explore lists of completions that are likely to be what they want next, rather than having to sort through options alphabetically. "With code completions, developers can both avoid misspellings and explore APIs by typing the beginning of expected symbols and choosing from the offered completions," explains Google project manager Michael Thomsen in his article, 'Announcing Dart 2.5: Supercharged development'.

Google's take on AI-powered code completion for Dart relies on a model trained on a large body of Dart code on GitHub. The model is powered by Google's TensorFlow Lite deep-learning framework and can predict what developers will type next as they're editing code.
ML Complete is built into the Dart analyzer, meaning the preview is available in "Dart-enabled editors" including Android Studio, IntelliJ, and VS Code.

Almost a year ago, Discord launched its own games store and overhauled the Nitro subscription service to offer access to a library of games in addition to other chat and server related perks. From a report: The app's store has gone through several changes over the year, with games ultimately being sold directly through developers' Discord servers instead of the original dedicated portal. However, the library of games Nitro subscribers get access to is getting axed, and its because almost nobody actually played them, per Discord. "We learned a lot from all of you over the last year. Through your valuable feedback, it became clear that while we and some of you love these games, the truth is the vast majority of Nitro subscribers didn't play them," said the company in a blog post today.

"So, after careful consideration, we won't be hitting Continue when these contracts come up for renewal. The removal affects users who are registered for the $9.99 per month (or the $99.99 annual) Nitro subscription, who will no longer be able to play the almost 100-strong catalog of games -- seen on the left image -- from October 15, 2019. To those who may have been caught off guard by the announcement and want to cancel Nitro, Discord is also offering refunds on the subscription.

urdak writes: Four years ago, ScyllaDB introduced Scylla -- a new open-source NoSQL database, compatible with the popular Cassandra but 10 times faster. Today, the project announced support for the DynamoDB API as well. This will allow applications that use Amazon's DynamoDB to be migrated to other public or private clouds -- running on Scylla instead of DynamoDB. Beyond the added choice, large users may also see their cloud bills drastically reduced by moving to Scylla: ScyllaDB reported in the past that the total cost of running Scylla is only one seventh the cost of DynamoDB.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Microsoft bought 6Wunderkinder, the developer of Wunderlist, in 2015, officials said they planned to shut down that task-management app at some point and replace it with its own To Do app. That move still hasn't happened. But this week, Microsoft is rolling out a redesign of To Do that attempts to make it look more like Wunderlist. On September 9, Microsoft introduced the redesigned To Do, which has smaller headers and more colors. The app is more customizable now with a variety of backgrounds, "including the beloved Berlin TV tower that was a feature in Wunderlist." The app can sync across Mac, iOS, Android, Windows and the Web. And it integrates with Microsoft work or school email accounts; hosted email accounts like Outlook, Hotmail or Live; Microsoft Planner; and Microsoft Launcher on Android. Just so it happens, last week Wunderlist founder Christian Reber said that he'd like to buy Wunderlist back from Microsoft. Today he tweeted "GREAT timing," in regards to Microsoft's To Do makeover.

Top spots in App Store search results are some of the most fought over real estate in the online economy. The store generated more than $50 billion in sales last year, and the company said two-thirds of app downloads started with a search. But as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that the company has been tipping the scales in its own favor are at the heart of antitrust complaints in the United States, Europe and Russia. From a report: Apple's apps have ranked first recently for at least 700 search terms in the store, according to a New York Times analysis of six years of search results compiled by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. Some searches produced as many as 14 Apple apps before showing results from rivals, the analysis showed. (Though competitors could pay Apple to place ads above the Apple results.) Presented with the results of the analysis, two senior Apple executives acknowledged in a recent interview that, for more than a year, the top results of many common searches in the iPhone App Store were packed with the company's own apps. That was the case even when the Apple apps were less relevant and less popular than ones from its competitors. The executives said the company had since adjusted the algorithm so that fewer of its own apps appeared at the top of search results.

The Times's analysis of App Store data -- which included rankings of more than 1,800 specific apps across 13 keywords since 2013 -- illustrated the influence as well as the opacity of the algorithms that underpin tech companies' platforms. Those algorithms can help decide which apps are installed, which articles are read and which products are bought. But Apple and other tech giants like Facebook and Google will not explain in detail how such algorithms work -- even when they blame the algorithm for problems. [...] On Aug. 21, Apple apps ranked first in 735 of roughly 60,000 search terms tracked by Sensor Tower. Most of the tracked searches were obscure, but Apple's apps ranked first for many of the popular queries. For instance, for most of June and July, Apple apps were the top result for these search terms: books, music, news, magazines, podcasts, video, TV, movies, sports, card, gift, money, credit, debit, fitness, people, friends, time, notes, docs, files, cloud, storage, message, home, store, mail, maps, traffic, stocks and weather. In July this year, the company pushed some changes to its app store algorithm to handicap its apps to help other developers, it told The New York Times.

ZDNet remembers when the only programming languages "were machine and assembler," until Burroughs Corporation programmer Mary Hawes proposed a vendor-neutral language with an English-like vocabulary. (Grace Hopper suggested they approach the Department of Defense, leading to a summit of 41 computer users and manufacturers at the Pentagon in 1959.)

But ZDNet argues that 60 years later, COBOL isn't done yet. In 2016, the Government Accountability Office reported the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Social Security Administration, to name just three, were still using COBOL. According to a COBOL consulting company, which goes by the delightful name, COBOL Cowboys, 200 billion lines of COBOL code are still in use today and 90% of Fortune 500 companies still having COBOL code keeping the lights on. And, if you've received cash out of an ATM recently, it's almost certain COBOL was running behind the scenes.
ZDNet explains that's the largest number of businesses using COBOL are financial institutions, which, according to Micro Focus includes "banking, insurance and wealth management/equities trading. Second is government services (federal, provincial, local)." Micro Focus is the company that now maintains COBOL, and their global director of marketing and "application modernization" tells ZDNet that "the number of organizations running COBOL systems today is in the tens of thousands. It is impossible to estimate the tens of millions of end users who interface with COBOL-based applications on a daily basis, but the language's reliance is clearly seen with its use in 70 percent of global transaction processing systems. Any time you phone a call center, any time you transfer money, or check your account, or pay a mortgage, or renew or get an insurance quote, or when contacting a government department, or shipping a parcel, or ordering some flowers, or buying something online at a whole range of retailers, or booking a vacation, or a flight, or trading stocks, or even checking your favorite baseball team's seasonal statistics, you are interacting with COBOL.
ZDNet notes that some people are even moving their COBOL applications into the cloud, concluding "At this rate, COBOL programs will outlive us all."

Developers have come to accept that, without warning, Apple can make their work obsolete by announcing a new app or feature that essentially copies their ideas. Some apps have simply buckled under the pressure. The Washington Post: Clue, a popular app women use to track their periods, has risen to near the top of Apple's Health and Fitness category. It could be downhill from here. Apple plans this month to incorporate some of Clue's core functionality such as fertility and period prediction into its own Health app that comes pre-installed in every iPhone and is free, unlike Clue, which earns money by selling subscriptions and services in its free app. Apple's past incorporation of functionality included in other third-party apps has often led to their demise. Clue's new threat shows how Apple plays a dual role in the app economy: provider of access to independent apps and giant competitor to them.

Developers have come to accept that, without warning, Apple can make their work obsolete by announcing a new app or feature that uses or incorporates their ideas. Some apps have simply buckled under the pressure, in some cases shutting down. They generally don't sue Apple because of the difficulty and expense in fighting the tech giant -- and the consequences they might face from being dependent on the platform. The imbalance of power between Apple and the apps on its platform could turn into a rare chink in the company's armor as regulators and lawmakers put the dominance of big technology companies under an antitrust microscope. When Apple made a flashlight part of its operating system in 2013, it rendered instantly redundant a myriad apps that offered that functionality. Everything from the iPhone's included "Measure" app to its built-in animated emoji were originally apps in the App Store.

A change Apple is making to improve privacy in an upcoming version of its iPhone operating system has alarmed an unlikely group of software makers: developers of privacy-focused encrypted messaging apps. The Information (paywalled): They warn the change, which is already available in public test versions of iOS 13, could end up undermining the privacy goals that prompted it in the first place. The Information previously reported that the technical change Apple is making to its next operating systems, iOS 13, has sparked concern at Facebook, which believes it will have to make significant modifications to encrypted messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to comply. But a much wider group of developers of encrypted messaging apps -- including Signal, Wickr, Threema and Wire -- is scrambling to overhaul their software so that key privacy features continue to work. Apple told The Information on Wednesday in a statement that it is working with the developers to resolve their concerns. "We've heard feedback on the API changes introduced in iOS 13 to further protect user privacy and are working closely with iOS developers to help them implement their feature requests," an Apple spokesperson said.

Independent Scottish developer Muirhall Energy announced on Monday that construction has begun at the Crossdykes Wind Farm, an important step in the company's effort to deliver Scotland's first subsidy-free onshore wind project. CleanTechnica reports: The 46 megawatt (MW) Crossdykes Wind Farm, being developed at Dumfries and Galloway, in the western Southern Uplands of Scotland, is expected to produce first power in September 2020. Muirhall Energy and its partners WWS Renewables reached financial close on the project in August -- believed to be the first subsidy-free development to be project-financed, thanks to funding from Close Brothers Leasing and wind turbines to be supplied by Nordex. Muirhall has also offered the local Dumfries and Galloway community the opportunity to buy up to 10% of the project via a community share offer. "We are delighted to be starting construction on what will be one of the first subsidy-free developments to come online in the UK," said Chris Walker, Managing Director of Muirhall Energy. "That is testament to the work we have done as a company, but also the flexibility shown by all our partners as we finalized our plans for the project."

"We are now very much focused on working to our tight construction timeline and progressing a number of the other projects in our portfolio which we believe can be made to work on a similar model. With more than 300 MW to begin construction over the next three years, this an exciting time for Muirhall Energy."

Gregor Hohpe: A significant share of architectural energy is spent on reducing or avoiding lock-in. That's a rather noble objective: architecture is meant to give us options and lock-in does the opposite. However, lock-in isn't a simple true-or-false matter: avoiding being locked into one aspect often locks you into another. Also, popular notions, such as open source automagically eliminating lock-in, turn out to be not entirely true. Time to have a closer look at lock-in, so you don't get locked up into avoiding it!

Last week Forbes ran an article by writer/data scientist Kurt Cagle arguing that Agile software development "was becoming less and less relevant." Within five days it had racked up 300,000 hits, and "I'm still digging out from the deluge of email, Tweets and Linked In messages," he wrote this week.

But in a new follow-up, Cagle looks back over his 40 years of programming, remembering successful six-month development cycles in the 1990s that used "a home-grown methodology which I've since dubbed the Studio Model, because it reflected the way that you create movies, television programs, orchestrated concerts, video games, and to be honest, most intellectual property." He then attempts a 12-point manifesto for this Agile alternative, which emphasizes things like a clear vision, good design, redundancy, flexibility, and remembering that as a project moves forward changes become "exponentially expensive". All too often, proponents of certain methodologies want to claim that their methodologies are the reason for success, when in reality, the deciding factor was the skill and tenaciousness of the people involved, the presence of a clearly articulated vision that could be changed as needed but that was not written in jello, and on recognizing the distinction between providing flexibility and fueling failures.

Agile is not, by itself, a methodology. The Agile Manifesto is a wish-list, written primarily by programmers, in response to the incessant micro-management by non-technical managers who were in general too incompetent to learn about the technology that they managed. I cheered when I first read it... Agile legitimized the idea that all stakeholders must be involved in the process of shaping the product's constraints and parameters (something that even now is still more preached than practiced). It gave a voice to developers and (some) others in the production process who up until then often had little say, and its message to managers in particular about the need to trust in the competence of the people they manage is one that cannot be stressed loudly enough. Its emphasis on change management has spurred a lot of thought about the nature of change, experimentation and development costs in the field. And for all that I think that certain Agile tools are a bit on the cheesy size, the idea of formalizing the process of development in such a way as to give creatives both the opportunities and the tools to shape and push back on design decisions is invaluable.

Yet, there are two key sets of problems that the Agile community faces. The first, and foremost, is that it decentralizes responsibility too much -- it essentially punts on the whole issue of governance or editorial guidance. This is that whole vision thing all over again... Agile empowers autonomous teams, but those teams still need to be able to pull together towards a common set of goals, and this means sacrificing some autonomy for cohesiveness. Agile also does not (ironically) distribute very well for precisely that same reason...

Agile may be everywhere, as several readers suggested, but scratch the surface a bit and you'll find that most of those successful agile projects were ones where you had a strong architect or steward, a culture that was already primed to work in a more Studio-Model like manner, a strong design in the first place as a foundation, and exceptional team-members that used agile in the way it should be used -- as a scaffold, rather than a crutch. There are good things to take out of the last twenty years of Agile, but this is not 2000, and it's well past time to acknowledge what's worked with Agile ... and what hasn't.

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: On PHPday in Verona (Italy) Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, gave an enlightening talk on PHP and its history. 25 years of PHP (video of the talk) is ripe with details on PHP, the design choices behind the web's favorite server-side templating language and with explanations on why what you may think of as an inconsistent mess actually makes perfect sense just the way it is. Very insightful, fun, interesting and a must-watch for PHP lovers and haters alike.
Introducing one slide, Lerdorf remembers that in the 1990s, "the web looked like this -- CGI bins written in C."

But he also shows his first computers from the 1980s at the beginning of the talk, before moving on to screenshots of Gopher, and then of the Mosaic browser. "This changed everything. And not just for me, for everybody...

"Everybody around at the time, playing with this stuff, and having had UUCP addresses and playing with Usenet and bulletin boards -- it was very easy to see that this was going to change the world."

Packt's recent story about Rust had the headline "Rust is the future of systems programming, C is the new Assembly."

But there was an interesting discussion about the story on LWN.net. One reader suggested letting people write drivers for the Linux kernel in Rust. ("There's a good chance that encouraging people to submit their wacky drivers in Rust would improve the quality of the driver, partly because you can focus attention on the unsafe parts.")

And that comment drew an interesting follow-up:

"I spoke with Greg Kroah-Hartman, and he said he'd be willing to accept a framework in the kernel for writing drivers in Rust, as long as 1) for now it wasn't enabled by default (even if you did "make allyesconfig") so that people don't *need* Rust to build the kernel, and 2) it shows real benefits beyond writing C, such as safe wrappers for kernel APIs."

Someone from the Rust language governance team gave an interesting talk at this year's Open Source Technology Summit. Josh Triplett (who is also a principal engineer at Intel), discussed "what Intel is contributing to bring Rust to full parity with C," in a talk titled Intel and Rust: the Future of Systems Programming.

An anonymous reader quotes Packt: Triplett believes that C is now becoming what Assembly was years ago. "C is the new Assembly," he concludes. Developers are looking for a high-level language that not only addresses the problems in C that can't be fixed but also leverage other exciting features that these languages provide. Such a language that aims to be compelling enough to make developers move from C should be memory safe, provide automatic memory management, security, and much more...

"Achieving parity with C is exactly what got me involved in Rust," says Triplett. Triplett's first contribution to the Rust programming language was in the form of the 1444 RFC, which was started in 2015 and got accepted in 2016. This RFC proposed to bring native support for C-compatible unions in Rust that would be defined via a new "contextual keyword" union...

He is starting a working group that will focus on achieving full parity with C. Under this group, he aims to collaborate with both the Rust community and other Intel developers to develop the specifications for the remaining features that need to be implemented in Rust for system programming. This group will also focus on bringing support for systems programming using the stable releases of Rust, not just experimental nightly releases of the compiler.
Last week Triplett posted that the FFI/C Parity working group "is in the process of being launched, and hasn't quite kicked off yet" -- but he promised to share updates when it does.

An anonymous reader quotes a blog post by Curtis Poe , a freelance Perl/Agile/testing consultant and the author of the Wrox book Beginning Perl: By now, many of you have seen the Perl 6 Github issue "Perl" in the name "Perl 6" is confusing and irritating. The issue suggested renaming Perl 6. While some may think that the name of the issue is trolling, or offensive, the actual issue was created by Elizabeth (Liz) Mattijsen, one of the core Perl 6 developers, a long-time Perl 5 developer, and with her spouse, Wendy, has long been an enthusiastic support of Perl 5/6. There is no trolling here. There is a lot of deep thought, careful discussion, and a genuine desire to find a way to bypass some deeply divisive issues in the Perl community.

While the proposed name was "camelia", Damian Conway made a strong argument in favor of "raku" and it appears the community is leaning towards this name for various reasons... The far, far too terse backstory: the Perl 6 community seems to be split between those who view Perl 6 as a sister language to Perl 5 and those who view Perl 6 as a successor to Perl 5...

To say that this issue has been bitterly divisive would be an understatement.

A week after a popular JavaScript library started showing full-blown ads in the npm command-line interface, npm, Inc., the company that runs the npm tool and website, has taken a stance and plans to ban such behavior in the future. From a report: "We are always working on improving our policies and expand on our commitments to the community," Ahmad Nassri, npm, Inc. CTO told ZDNet in an email this week. "To that end, we're making updates to our policies to be more explicit about the type of commercial content we do deem not acceptable." According to these upcoming updates, npm will ban:
1. Packages that display ads at runtime, on installation, or at other stages of the software development lifecycle, such as via npm scripts.
2. Packages with code that can be used to display ads are fine. Packages that themselves display ads are not.
3. Packages that themselves function primarily as ads, with only placeholder or negligible code, data, and other technical content.

You really have to give Oracle a lot of points for persistence, especially where the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract procurement process is concerned. An anonymous reader shares a report:For more than a year, the company has been complaining across every legal and government channel it can think of. In spite of every attempt to find some issue with the process, it has failed every time. That did not stop it today from filing a fresh appeal of last month's federal court decision that found against the company . Oracle refuses to go quietly into that good night, not when there are $10 billion federal dollars on the line, and today the company announced it was appealing Federal Claims Court Senior Judge Eric Bruggink's decision.

"Agile is not dead, quite the opposite," argues Alistair Cockburn, one of the co-authors of the original Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001: Why then, do we read of agile's death? Three reasons: phony ads, misunderstanding ordinary movement of ideas through society, and looking at the wrong curves... The sales pitch is pretty obvious when you look for it. Ignore those articles, they are just cheap sales tricks...

The pundits you are reading typically are innovators and early adopters. They adopted agile 10-15 years ago. Quite naturally, they have moved on and are working on the 2nd or 3rd round of interesting things that have arrived since then... They have been looking at lean startup, hypothesis testing, and agile product management, for example. All agile consequences, just a little more advanced. They have quite naturally (for them) forgotten the joy of discovering the agile approach for the first time. Everyone they know is already using it or has moved forward. To them it looks "passé", "dead"...

Choice A: agile. Choice B: something else. What is the something else that you think is more effective? For most projects, I can't think of another way that is more effective. Collaborate, deliver, reflect, improve, in cycles, from first idea until final delivery. This works whatever the nature of the project (no, agile is not just for software). Even badly done agile (please complain away at this moment, it's fine, there is a lot of bad agile out there), tends to be better than whatever came before it. That only tells you how bad all the things were that came before...

Agile is not dead, on the contrary. It's scarcely gotten started. Collaborate, deliver, reflect, and improve, in tight cycles. If you can find something better, use it.

Standard, a popular Javascript style guide library that is downloaded about three million times each month, is beginning to show ads when installed through npm, a developer announced this week. The move, which has been pegged as an experiment, comes as the developer looks to find sustainable ways to support contributions to the open source development. In a post, Feross Aboukhadijeh, a developer of Standard, said whenever Standard 14 is installed, "we'll display a message from a company that supports open source. The sponsorship pays directly for maintainer time. That is, writing new features, fixing bugs, answering user questions, and improving documentation."

The announcement has sparked a debate in the community with some suggesting that there should be a better way to support the FOSS developers without seeing ads on the terminal.

OneHundredAndTen shares "an interesting Forbes article that posits that Agile software development is losing relevance, it is not the silver bullet that some claimed, and it has become a sort of religion -- 'If Agile doesn't work for you, you are not doing it right.'"

Writer/data scientist Kurt Cagle even describes passing around "the holy hockey stick" while begging the scrum master for forgiveness, arguing that "like most religions it really didn't make that much sense to the outsider -- or even to the participants, when it got right down to it." Agile does not always scale well. Integration dependencies are often not tracked (or are subsumed into hierarchical stories), yet it tends to be one of the most variable aspects of any software development... [T]here are whole classes of projects where traditional Agile is counterproductive. Enterprise data projects, in particular, do not fit the criteria for being good Agile candidates... the kind of work that is being done is shifting from an engineering problem (dedicated short term projects intended to connect systems) to a curational one (mapping models via minimal technical tools).

This transition also points to what the future of Agile will end up being. In many respects we're leaving the application era of development -- applications are thinner, mostly web-based, where connectivity to both data sets and composite enterprise data will be more important than complex client-based functionality. This is also true of mobile applications -- increasingly, smart phone and tablet apps are just thin shells around mobile HTML+CSS, a sea-change from the "there's an app for that" era.

The client as relatively thin endpoint means that the environment for which Agile first emerged and for which it is most well suited -- stand-alone open source applications -- is disappearing. Today, the typical application is more likely a data stream of some sort, in which the value is not in the programming but in the data itself, with the programming consequently far simpler (and with a far broader array of existing tools) than was the case twenty or even ten years ago... While aspects of Agile will remain, the post-Agile world has different priorities and requirements, and we should expect whatever paradigm finally succeeds it to deal with the information stream as the fundamental unit of information.