Michael J. Ross writes "Veteran computer programmers — adept with languages such as PHP, Perl, and JavaScript — typically have no trouble learning an additional language, often just by reading online tutorials and stepping through sample code. But for those new to programming, that approach can prove difficult and frustrating. Yet nowadays there appears to be growing interest among such people for learning how to write programs in Python, especially as it is seeing increasing use by Google and other organizations, and is often chosen as the primary teaching language in schools. For such budding programmers, one possible starting point is the book Head First Python." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Perl 5.16.0 is now available with plenty of improvements all around. You can view a summary and all the change details here. With Perl on an annual release schedule, and projects like Mojolicious, Dancer, perlbrew, Plack, and Moose continuing to gain in popularity, are we in the middle of a Perl renaissance?"

CowboyRobot writes "Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki, wrote the Fit test framework, is the co-inventor of CRC cards, and is now promoting the concept of technical debt. He recently won the Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award and was interviewed by that publication. 'The creator of the Wiki dishes on the Wiki, Wikipedia's policies, OO design, technical debt, CoffeeScript and Perl, how to survive as a veteran programmer, and doing the simplest thing that could possibly work.' Cunningham is given the chance to explain his philosophy of coding: 'I like the picture and I like the look of the code. It's only 40 lines, but every line carried some careful thought. There was a learning curve there that surprised me because the programs looked short. The most rewarding work I've done this year is digging through that code and understanding what it does and understanding what it didn't do, and how to approach the problem.'"

Drethon writes "On this day in 2008, a submission was posted that C/C++ was losing ground so I decided to check out its current state. It seems that C has returned to the top while Java has dropped by the same amount, VB and PHP have dropped drastically, C++ is holding fast but now in third place and Objective-C and C# have climbed quite a bit. 2008 data thanks to SatanicPuppy: 1. Java (20.5%); 2. C (.14.7%); 3. VB (11.6%); 4. PHP (10.3%); 5. C++ (9.9%); 6. Perl (5.9%); 7. Python (4.5%); 8. C# (.3.8%); 9. Ruby(2.9%); 10. Delphi (2.7%). The other 10 in the top 20 are: JavaScript, D, PL/SQL, SAS, Pascal, Lisp/Scheme, FoxPro/xBase, COBOL, Ada, and ColdFusion."

An anonymous reader writes "Contrary to what many individuals think, not everybody on Slashdot went to college for a computer-related degree. Graduating in May of this year, my undergraduate degree will be in psychology. Like many undergraduate psychology students, I applied to a multitude of graduate programs but, unfortunately, was not given admission into a single one. Many are aware that a bachelor's degree in psychology is quite limiting, so I undoubtedly have been forced into a complicated situation. Despite my degree being in psychology, I have an immense interest in computers and the typical 'hard science' fields. How can one with a degree that is not related to computers acquire a job that is centered around computers? At the moment, I am self-taught and can easily keep up in a conversation of computer science majors. I also do a decent amount of programming in C, Perl, and Python and have contributed to small open source projects. Would Slashdot users recommend receiving a formal computer science education (only about two years, since the nonsensical general education requirements are already completed) before attempting to get such a job? Anybody else in a similar situation?"

First time accepted submitter tonique writes "Perl Data Language (PDL) 2.4.10 has been released. Highlights of the new release are automatic multi-thread support, support for data structures larger than 2 GB and POSIX threads support. Also available is the first draft of the new PDL book. PDL is especially suitable for scientists. For those not in the know, 'PDL gives standard Perl the ability to compactly store and speedily manipulate the large N-dimensional data arrays which are the bread and butter of scientific computing.' Commercial languages used for the same purpose include MATLAB and IDL."

mikejuk writes "The craigslist Charitable Fund has donated $100,000 to the Perl community for Perl5 maintenance and general use by the Perl Foundation. Craigslist gets more than 30 billion views per month and it is mostly written in Perl. The entire architecture of the system is open source — a proxy array based on Perl and memcache and a backend provided by Apache, memcache, MySQL and, of course, Perl. This is a successful enterprise giving something back to open source — which is how it should be."

First time accepted submitter Cara_Latham writes "Hoping to spur innovation and collaboration, Bloomberg LP is opening its market data interfaces to anyone, without cost or restriction. The market data provider's application programming interface (API), known as BLPAPI (Bloomberg LP API), is already used by Bloomberg, its clients and other technology providers to build connections between financial firms' applications and Bloomberg's market data and applications. Today any technology professional, or even students at a university, can access BLPAPI to quickly build connections to market data feeds. The BLPAPI interface works with a number of programming languages and operating systems, including Java, C, C++, .NET, COM and Perl."

You asked Carl Malamud about his experiences and hopes in the gargantuan project he's undertaken to prod the U.S. government into scanning archived documents, and to make public access (rather than availability only through special dispensation) the default for newly created, timely government data. (Malamud points out that if you have comments on what the government should be focusing on preserving, and how they should go about it, the National Archives would like to read them.) Below find answers with a mix of heartening and disheartening information about how the vast project is progressing.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes in favor of new programming languages, given the difficulty of upgrading existing, popular languages. 'Whenever a new programming language is announced, a certain segment of the developer population always rolls its eyes and groans that we have quite enough to choose from already,' McAllister writes. 'But once a language reaches a certain tipping point of popularity, overhauling it to include support for new features, paradigms, and patterns is easier said than done.' PHP 6, Perl 6, Python 3, ECMAScript 4 — 'the lesson from all of these examples is clear: Programming languages move slowly, and the more popular a language is, the slower it moves. It is far, far easier to create a new language from whole cloth than it is to convince the existing user base of a popular language to accept radical changes.'"

First time accepted submitter bushx writes "A little over a month ago, I assumed the position of programmer and sole IT personnel at a thriving e-commerce company. All the documentation I have is of my own creation, as I've spent most of my time reverse-engineering the systems in place just so I can understand how everything works together. Since I've started, I've done everything from network and phone upgrades to database maintenance with Perl, and thus far it's been immensely rewarding. But as I dig deeper, I notice the alarming number of band-aids applied by my predecessor, and it seems like the entire company's infrastructure is just a few problems away from a total meltdown. The big question now is, how do I, as a single person, effectively audit the network, servers, databases, backups, and formulate a long-term plan that can be implemented by one person? Is it possible? Where do I begin?"

AlexDomo writes to point out this statistical breakdown of the programming languages represented at StackOverflow. "Suprisingly, JavaScript turned out to be the most 'over-represented' language on StackOverflow, by quite a long way at 294% [where "a representation of 100% means that the SO tag count is aligned exactly with the TIOBE language index"]. Could this also be because programming JavaScript is generally quite difficult and will result in people seeking help more often? Following this was C# (which I had expected to be number 1), at 153%. After this, PHP, Ruby and Python were basically fairly balanced at around 100%. The most 'under-represented' major language would definitely be C at 11%. Three other major languages which seemed to be a bit under-represented, below 50%, were C++, Java and Objective-C. For details of the method used and the full results, refer to the original article." One of the attached comments makes an interesting point about the difficulty in divining meaning from such statistics, though.

First time accepted submitter gmikeska07 writes "I have no computer science degree, but I took a Java class in college and greatly enjoyed it. I have some experience with Javascript and have done some perl programming as well. I would like to learn Google's forthcoming Dart language. My question is in three parts: a) Is there any chance that if I self-teach Dart, I can get a job in development without a CS degree, once companies begin using the language? b) Is it really worth installing Virtual Studio as per the dartlang docs, or should I wait for a dedicated IDE like the rumored 'Brightly'? Alternatively, are there any solid open development environments that are adding support? c) Do you know of any books that are out or on the way that I could buy? What programming series do you guys recommend? Hopefully I can learn in my spare time, and if I can't get a job in development I can at least have fun with it, and maybe make a few libraries for the Dart community!"

First time accepted submitter QuantumMist writes "Researchers from Southern Illinois University have published a paper comparing Perl to Quorum(PDF) (their own statistically informed programming language) and Randomo (a programming language whose syntax is partially randomly generated). From the paper: 'Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance.' Reactions have been enthusiastic, and the authors have responded."

Kvorg writes "After a year of rapid development, newly released version 2.0 of Mojolicious, the new generation real-time Perl web framework written by Sebastian Riedel and many others, offers a versatile and elegant web framework that is as good at web scraping and simple scripts as it is at building complex, interactive real-time applications with HTML5 and websockets. It supports easy 0-dependency installs, excellent developer mode, multiple deployment scenarios, many CPAN modules and plugins."

eldavojohn writes "The Metasploit Framework has come a long way and currently allows just about anyone to configure and execute exploits effortlessly. Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide takes current documentation further and provides a valuable resource for people who are interested in security but don't have the time or money to take a training class on Metasploit. The highlights of the book rest on the examples provided to the reader as exercises in exploiting several older versions of operating systems like Windows XP and Ubuntu while at the same time avoiding triggering antivirus or detection. The only weak point of this book is that a couple chapters refer the reader to external texts (on stacks and registers) in order to meet requirements for crafting exploits. The book also gives the reader a brief warning on ethics as many of these exploits and techniques would most likely work on many sites and networks. If you're wondering how seemingly inexperienced groups like lulzsec constantly claim victims, this would be an excellent read." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

Last week you asked the Director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Eben Upton, about developing an ultra-low-cost computer and running a charitable organization. Below you'll find his answers. Thanks go out to a busy Eben for responding so quickly.

After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it's finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college. Since then it has grown to be read by more than a million people, and has served Billions and Billions of Pages (yes, in my head I hear the voice). During my tenure I have done my best to keep Slashdot firmly grounded in its origins, but now it's time for someone else to come aboard and find the *future*. Personally I don't have any plans, but if you need to get ahold of me for any reason, you can find me as @cmdrtaco on twitter or Rob Malda on Google+. You could also update my mail address to be malda at cmdrtaco dot net. Hit the link below if you want to read some nostalgic saccharine crap that I need to get out of my system before I sign off for the last time.

jcasman writes "Some entrepreneurs wait a lifetime to experience the thrill of selling their startup companies. Daniil Kulchenko, a Seattle area high school student, accomplished that milestone at the age of 15. Kulchenko today announced that he's sold his startup, a cloud-based computing company known as Phenona, to Vancouver, B.C.-based ActiveState in a deal of undisclosed size."

chromatic writes "Pumpking Jesse Vincent has just released Perl 5.14, the latest stable version of the venerable Perl 5 programming language. The list of changes in Perl 5.14 includes several enhancements, including performance tuning, Unicode improvements, and updates to the core libraries and documentation. Perl 5.16 is on track for a release next April."