New submitter axlash writes: It has been reported on X that Niklaus Wirth, inventor and co-inventor of several languages including Pascal, Euler and Oberon, died on Jan 1, 2024. He was aged 89. "We lost a titan of programming languages, programming methodology, software engineering and hardware design," writes software engineer Bertrand Meyer in a post on X. "Niklaus Wirth passed away on the first of January. We mourn a pioneer, colleague, mentor and friend."

Niklaus Wirth, born on February 15, 1934, in Switzerland, is a renowned computer scientist known for his significant contributions to the field of computer science and software engineering. He is best known for developing several programming languages, including ALGOL W, Pascal, and Modula-2, which have had a profound impact on the design and development of modern computer software. Wirth's work emphasized simplicity, clarity, and efficiency in programming languages, which greatly influenced subsequent language design and the development of structured programming techniques. His legacy also includes the development of the Oberon programming language and the design of the Oberon operating system. Wirth's dedication to elegant and efficient software design continues to inspire computer scientists and software engineers worldwide, making him a highly respected figure in the history of computing.

You can learn more about Wirth via A.M. Turing Award, Britannica, and the Computer History Museum.

On December 15 GitHub declared end-of-life for its "hackable text editor" Atom. But Long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM wants to remind everyone that after the announcement of Atom's sunset, "the community came together to keep Atom alive."

First there was the longstanding fork Atom-Community. But "due to differences in long-term goals for the editor, a new version was born: Pulsar."

From the Pulsar web site: Pulsar [sometimes referred to as Pulsar-Edit] aims to not only reach feature parity with the original Atom, but to bring Pulsar into the 21st century by updating the underlying architecture, and supporting modern features.

With many new features on the roadmap, once Pulsar is stable, it will be a true, Community-Based, Hackable, Text Editor.
"Of course, the user interface is much of the same," writes the blog Its FOSS, and it's cross-platform (supporting Linux, macOS, and Windows).

"The essentials seem to be there with the documentation, packages, and features like the ability to install packages from Git repositories..."

theodp writes: Back in May 2021, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org touted the signing of a licensing agreement with WhiteHat Jr., allowing the edtech company with a controversial past (Whitehat Jr. was bought for $300M in 2020 by Byju's, an edtech firm that received a $50M investment from Mark Zuckerberg's venture firm) to integrate Code.org's free-to-educators-and-organizations content and tools into their online tutoring service. Code.org did not reveal what it was charging Byju's to use its "free curriculum and open source technology" for commercial purposes, but Code.org's 2021 IRS 990 filing reported $1M in royalties from an unspecified source after earlier years reported $0. Coincidentally, Whitehat Jr. is represented by Aaron Kornblum, who once worked at Microsoft for now-President Brad Smith, who left Code.org's Board just before the lawsuit was filed.

Fast forward to 2023 and the bloom is off the rose, as Court records show that Code.org earlier this month sued Whitehat Education Technology, LLC (Exhibits A and B) in what is called "a civil action for breach of contract arising from Whitehat's failure to pay Code.org the agreed-upon charges for its use of Code.org's platform and licensed content and its ongoing, unauthorized use of that platform and content." According to the filing, "Whitehat agreed [in April 2022] to pay to Code.org licensing fees totaling $4,000,000 pursuant to a four-year schedule" and "made its first four scheduled payments, totaling $1,000,000," but "about a year after the Agreement was signed, Whitehat informed Code.org that it would be unable to make the remaining scheduled license payments." While the original agreement was amended to backload Whitehat's license fee payment obligations, "Whitehat has not paid anything at all beyond the $1,000,000 that it paid pursuant to the 2022 invoices before the Agreement was amended" and "has continued to access Code.org's platform and content."

That Byju's Whitehat Jr. stiffed Code.org is hardly shocking. In June 2023, Reuters reported that Byju's auditor Deloitte cut ties with the troubled Indian Edtech startup that was once an investor darling and valued at $22 billion, adding that a Byju's Board member representing the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had resigned with two other Board members. The BBC reported in July that Byju's was guilty of overexpanding during the pandemic (not unlike Zuck's Facebook). Ironically, the lawsuit Exhibits include screenshots showing Mark Zuckerberg teaching Code.org lessons. Zuckerberg and Facebook were once among the biggest backers of Code.org, although it's unclear whether that relationship soured after court documents were released that revealed Code.org's co-founders talking smack about Zuck and Facebook's business practices to lawyers for Six4Three, which was suing Facebook.

Code.org's curriculum is also used by the Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) initiative, but it is unclear what royalties -- if any -- Amazon pays to Code.org for the use of Code.org curriculum. While the AFE site boldly says, "we provide free computer science curriculum," the AFE fine print further explains that "our partners at Code.org and ProjectSTEM offer a wide array of introductory and advance curriculum options and teacher training." It's unclear what kind of organization Amazon's AFE ("Computer Science Learning Childhood to Career") exactly is -- an IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search failed to find any hits for "Amazon Future Engineer" -- making it hard to guess whether Code.org might consider AFE's use of Code.org software 'commercial use.' Would providing a California school district with free K-12 CS curriculum that Amazon boasts of cultivating into its "vocal champion" count as "commercial use"? How about providing free K-12 CS curriculum to children who live where Amazon is seeking incentives? Or if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos testifies Amazon "funds computer science coursework" for schools as he attempts to counter a Congressional antitrust inquiry? These seem to be some of the kinds of distinctions Richard Stallman anticipated more than a decade ago as he argued against a restriction against commercial use of otherwise free software.

Programmer and writer Jose Gilgado, writes about WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s that continues to work reliably well. Famously author George R.R. Martin used the application to write "A Song of Ice and Fire." "It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital, if I'd wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital," R.R. Martin said earlier, as we previously covered.

Gilgado argues that WordStar 4.0 embodies the concept of finished software -- a software you can use forever with no unneeded changes. He adds: Sometimes, a software upgrade is a step backward: less usable, less stable, with new bugs. Even if it's genuinely better, there's the learning curve. You were efficient with the old version, but now your most used button is on the other side of the screen under a hidden menu. In a world where constant change is the norm, finished software provides a breath of fresh air. It's a reminder that reliability, consistency, and user satisfaction can coexist in the realm of software development. So the next time you find yourself yearning for the latest update, remember that sometimes, the best software is the one that doesn't change at all.

A Canadian cybersecurity firm has warned that as soon as 2025, quantum computers could make current encryption methods useless.

But now Slashdot reader christoban shares a "reality check" — an IEEE Spectrum takedown with the tagline "Hype is everywhere, skeptics say, and practical applications are still far away." The quantum computer revolution may be further off and more limited than many have been led to believe. That's the message coming from a small but vocal set of prominent skeptics in and around the emerging quantum computing industry... [T]here's growing pushback against what many see as unrealistic expectations for the technology. Meta's head of AI research Yann LeCun recently made headlines after pouring cold water on the prospect of quantum computers making a meaningful contribution in the near future.

Speaking at a media event celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Meta's Fundamental AI Research team he said the technology is "a fascinating scientific topic," but that he was less convinced of "the possibility of actually fabricating quantum computers that are actually useful." While LeCun is not an expert in quantum computing, leading figures in the field are also sounding a note of caution. Oskar Painter, head of quantum hardware for Amazon Web Services, says there is a "tremendous amount of hype" in the industry at the minute and "it can be difficult to filter the optimistic from the completely unrealistic."

A fundamental challenge for today's quantum computers is that they are very prone to errors. Some have suggested that these so-called "noisy intermediate-scale quantum" (NISQ) processors could still be put to useful work. But Painter says there's growing recognition that this is unlikely and quantum error-correction schemes will be key to achieving practical quantum computers. The leading proposal involves spreading information over many physical qubits to create "logical qubits" that are more robust, but this could require as many as 1,000 physical qubits for each logical one. Some have suggested that quantum error correction could even be fundamentally impossible, though that is not a mainstream view. Either way, realizing these schemes at the scale and speeds required remains a distant goal, Painter says... "I would estimate at least a decade out," he says.
A Microsoft technical fellow believes there's fewer applications where quantum computers can really provide a meaningful advantage, since operating a qubit its magnitudes slower than simply flipping a transistor, which also makes the throughput rate for data thousands or even millions of times slowers.

"We found out over the last 10 years that many things that people have proposed don't work," he says. "And then we found some very simple reasons for that."

"It's like visiting an old friend for the holidays," according to this article: Approaching his 86th birthday, Donald Knuth — Stanford's beloved computer science guru — honored what's become a long-standing tradition. He gave a December "Christmas lecture" that's also streamed online for all of his fans...

More than 60 years ago, back in 1962, a 24-year-old Donald Knuth first started writing The Art of Computer Programming — a comprehensive analysis of algorithms which, here in 2023, he's still trying to finish. And 30 years ago Knuth also began making rare live appearances each December in front of audiences of Stanford students...

Recently Stanford uploaded several decades of Knuth's past Christmas lectures, along with a series of 22 videos of Knuth from 1985 titled "the 'Aha' Sessions'" (courses in mathematical problem-solving). There are also two different sets of five videos from 1981 showing Knuth introducing his newly-created typesetting system TeX. There are even 12 videos from 1982 of what Knuth calls "an intensive course about the internal details."

And on Dec. 6, wearing his traditional brown holiday sweater, Knuth gave yet another live demonstration of the beautifully clear precision that's made him famous.

It's a geek tradition that started online back in 2000. Programming language "advent calendars" offer daily tips about a programming language (if not a Christmas-themed programming puzzle) -- one a day through December 25th.

And 2023 finds a wide variety of fun sites to choose from:

• li>For example, there's 24 coding challenges at the Advent of JavaScript site (where "each challenge includes all the HTML and CSS you need to get started, allowing you to focus on the JavaScript.") And there's another 24 coding challenges on a related site... Advent of CSS.

• The cyber security training platform "TryHackMe.com" even coded up a site they call "Advent of Cyber," daring puzzle-solvers to "kickstart your cyber security career by engaging in a new, beginner-friendly exercise every day leading up to Christmas!"

• The programming puzzles at Advent of Code are continuing through the 25th (though so far less than 30,000 people have solved both parts of Saturday's challenge.)

• Every year since 2000 there's also been a new edition of the Perl Advent Calendar, and this month Year 23 started off with goodies from Perl's massive module repository, CPAN. (Specifically its elf-themed story references the Music::MelodicDevice::Ornamentation module) -- along with the MIDI::Util library and TiMidity++, a software synthesizer that can play MIDI files without a hardware synthesizer.)

• Meanwhile, since 2009 there's also been an advent calendar for Raku (the programming language formerly known as Perl 6), promising an article a day. (Day One's entry was titled "Rocking Raku Meets Stodgy Debian...")

• James Bennett, from the Django project's core team, is even attempting a Python/Django Advent calendar.

• There's also a JVM advent calendar for the Java Virtual Machine, plus another advent calendar promising daily posts about C#.

• The HTMHell site â" which bills itself as "a collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites" -- is celebrating the season with the "HTMHell Advent Calendar," promising daily articles on security, accessibility, UX, and performance.

He specified the JSON notation, and developed tools like JSLint and the minifier JSMin. His Wikipedia entry says he was also a senior JavaScript architect at PayPal — but he's probably better known for writing O'Reilly's book JavaScript: the Good Parts.

But Doug Crockford has a new challenge. O'Reilly's monthly tech newsletter says Crockford "has created a new programming language called Misty. It is designed to be used both by students and professional programmers."

The language's official site calls it "a dynamic, general-purpose, transitional, actor language. It has a gentle syntax that is intended to benefit students, as well as advanced features such as capability security and lambdas with lexical scoping..." The language is quite strict in its use of spaces and indentation. In most programming languages, code spacing and formatting are underspecified, which leads to many incompatible conventions of style, some promoting bug formation, and all promoting time-wasting arguments, incompatibilities, and hurt feelings. Misty instead allows only one convention which is strictly enforced. This liberates programmers to focus their attention on more important matters.

Indentation is in increments of 4 spaces. The McKeeman Form is extended by three special rules to make this possible:


indentation
The spaces required by the current nesting.

increase_indentation
Append four spaces to the indentation.

decrease_indentation
Remove four spaces from the indentation.


The indentation is the number of spaces required at the beginning of a line as determined by its nesting level.


indent
increase_indentation linebreak

outdent
decrease_indentation linebreak


The linebreak rule allows the insertion of a comment, ends the line, and checks the indentation of the next line. Multiple comments and blank lines may appear wherever a line can end.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: It's a question that comes up all the time on Reddit. Etsy even created a special page for programmer-themed gift suggestions (showing more than 5,000 results). While CNET sticks to broader lists of "tech gifts" — and a separate list for "Star Wars gifts" — other sites around the web have been specifically honing in on programmer-specific suggestions. (Blue light-blocking glasses... A giant rubber duck... The world's strongest coffee... A printer that transfers digital images onto cheese...)

So while in years past Amazon has said they laughed at customer reviews for cans of uranium, this year Amazon has now added a special section that's entirely dedicated to Gifts for Computer Programmers, according to this funny rundown of 2023's "Gifts for Programmers" (that ends up recommending ChatGPT gift cards and backyard office sheds):
From the article: [Amazon's Gifts for Programmers section] shows over 3,000 results, with geek-friendly subcategories like "Glassware & Drinkware" and "Novelty Clothing"... For the coder in your life, Amazon offers everything from brain–teasing programming puzzles to computer–themed jigsaw puzzles. Of course, there's also a wide selection of obligatory funny t–shirts... But this year there's also tech-themed ties and motherboard-patterned socks...

Some programmers, though, might prefer a gift that's both fun and educational. And what's more entertaining than using your Python skills to program a toy robot dog...? But if you're shopping for someone who's more of a cat person, Petoi sells a kit for building a programmable (and open source) cat robot named "Nybble". The sophisticated Arduino-powered feline can be programmed with Python and C++ (as well as block-based coding)... [part of] the new community that's building around "OpenCat", the company's own quadruped robotic pet framework (open sourced on GitHub).

Government researchers in the U.S. are studying methods to help identify hackers based on the code they use to carry out cyberattacks. From a report: The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the lead federal research agency for the intelligence community, plans to develop technologies that could speed up investigations for identifying perpetrators of cyberattacks. "The number of attacks is increasing far more than the number of forensic experts that are available to go after these attacks," said Kristopher Reese, who is managing the research program at IARPA and holds a doctorate in computer science and engineering. The lack of forensic resources means hackers who target small organizations or companies that don't fall under critical infrastructure sectors often escape identification, he said.

Tools that are developed as part of the planned 30-month research project won't replace human analysts, who are crucial for identifying social and political dynamics that might explain why a particular hacking group targeted a victim, Reese said. But using artificial intelligence to analyze code used in cyberattacks will make investigations more efficient, he said. IARPA is accepting pitches from researchers until next month and plans to begin research next summer. [...] There hasn't been enough research into how analyzing code can reveal a hacker's identity, Reese said. Behavioral traits evident in code can reveal specific countries where hackers might be from or even the university where they were trained, he said. Some companies also have style guides outlining how employees should program, which could leave traces that indicate a person worked there, he said.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: DLang is among the newer breed of memory-safe languages being endorsed by Western security agencies over the past few years, the same type of language that cyber criminals are switching to. At least three new DLang-based malware strains have been used in attacks on worldwide organizations spanning the manufacturing, agriculture, and physical security industries, Cisco Talos revealed today. The attacks form part of what's being called "Operation Blacksmith" and are attributed to a group tracked as Andariel, believed to be a sub-division of the Lazarus Group -- North Korea's state-sponsored offensive cyber unit. [...]

The researchers noted that DLang is an uncommon choice for writing malware, but a shift towards newer languages and frameworks is one that's been accelerating over the last few years -- in malware coding as in the larger programming world. Rust, however, has often shown itself to be the preferred choice out of what is a fairly broad selection of languages deemed to be memory-safe. AlphV/BlackCat was the first ransomware group to make such a shift last year, re-writing its payload in Rust to offer its affiliates a more reliable tool. A month later, the now-shuttered Hive group did the same thing, and many others followed after that. Other groups to snub Rust include China-based Sandman which was recently observed using Lua-based malware, believed to be part of a wider shift toward Lua development from Chinese attackers.

TechSpot remembers that Turbo Pascal "stands out as one of the first instances of an integrated development environment (IDE), providing a text-based interface through which developers could write their code, compile it, and finally link it with runtime libraries." The early IDE, written in Assembly, eschewed the use of floppies, instead building the code directly in RAM for an unprecedented performance boost.

The language demonstrated superior speed, greater convenience, and a more affordable price compared to its competition. Philippe Kahn, Borland's CEO who initially conceptualized turning the new language into an all-in-one product, decided to sell the software via mail orders for just $49.95, establishing a market presence for the then-newly founded company.
It was called "Turbo" because its use of RAM made it considerable faster, adds the Register: Anders Hejlsberg, who would later go on to join Microsoft as part of the C# project, is widely credited as creator of the language, with Borland boss Philippe Kahn identifying the need for the all-in-one tool...

Version 1 had limitations. Source code files, for example, were limited to 64 KB. It would only produce .COM executable files for DOS and CP/M — although other architectures and operating systems were supported. It would also run from a single floppy disk, saving users from endless swapping in a world where single drives were the norm and a hard disk seemed impossibly exotic — and expensive... However, it was with version 4, in 1987, that Turbo Pascal changed dramatically. For one, support for CP/M and CP/M-86 was dropped, and the compiler would generate .EXE executables under DOS, lifting the .COM restrictions...

For this writer, 1989's version 5.5 was peak Turbo Pascal. Object-oriented programming features turned up, including classes and inheritance, and a step-by-step debugger. Version 6 and 7 brought in inline assembly and support for the creation of Windows executables and DLLs respectively, but version 7 also marked the end of the line as far as Borland was concerned. Turbo Pascal for Windows would turn up, but was eventually superseded by Delphi.

However, the steamroller of tools such as Visual Basic 3 ensured that Borland never had the same success in Windows that it enjoyed under DOS. As for Turbo Pascal, several versions were eventually released by Borland as freeware including version 1 for DOS, 5.5, and 7.
I once took a computer programming course taught entirely in Pascal. (Functions, subroutines, and procedures...)

Any Slashdot readers have their own memories to share about Pascal?

"Every day, 3 trillion dollars worth of transactions are handled by a 64-year-old programming language that hardly anybody knows anymore," writes PC Magazine. But most school's don't teach the mainframe programming language COBOL any more, and "COBOL cowboys" are aging out of the workforce, with replacements in short supply.

"This is precisely the kind of problem that IBM thinks it can fix with AI." IBM's approach is fairly straightforward: Rather than relying exclusively on a limited pool of human programmers to solve the problem, it built a generative AI-powered code assistant (watsonx) that helps convert all that dusty old COBOL code to a more modern language, thereby saving coders countless hours of reprogramming. In extremely simplified terms, the process is similar to feeding an essay written in English into ChatGPT and asking it to translate certain paragraphs into Esperanto. It allows programmers to take a chunk of COBOL and enlist watsonx to transform it into Java.

But of course, it's not quite that simple in practice... After IBM and the customer have a thorough understanding of the application landscape, the data flow, and the existing dependencies, "we help them refactor their applications," says IBM's Vice President of Product Management, IT Automation, Keri Olson. "That is, breaking it down into smaller pieces, which the customer can selectively choose, at that point, to do the modernization from COBOL to Java." Skyla Loomis, IBM's Vice President of IBM Z Software adds, "But you have to remember that this is a developer assistant tool. It's AI assisted, but it still requires the developer. So yes, the developer is involved with the tooling and helping the customers select the services."

Once the partnership between man and machine is established, the AI steps in and says, 'Okay, I want to transform this portion of code. The developer may still need to perform some minor editing of the code that the AI provides, Loomis explains. "It might be 80 or 90 percent of what they need, but it still requires a couple of changes. It's a productivity enhancement — not a developer replacement type of activity."
The article quotes a skeptical Gartner Distinguished Vice President and Analyst, who notes that IBM "has no case studies, at this time, to validate its claims."

The Go team conducted a survey of Go Developers in August — and has just released the results. Among the findings: "90% of survey respondents saying they felt satisfied while working with Go during the prior year," while 6% said they were dissastified. Further, the number of people working with Go continues to increase; we see evidence of this from external research like Stack Overflow's Developer Survey (which found 14% of professional developers worked with Go during the past year, a roughly 15% year-over-year increase), as well as analytics for go.dev (which show an 8% rise in visitors year-over-year). Combining this growth with a high satisfaction score is evidence that Go continues to appeal to developers, and suggests that many developers who choose to learn the language feel good about their decision long afterwards...

As in prior years, the majority of survey respondents told us they work with Go on Linux (63%) and macOS (58%) systems... We do continue to see that newer members of the Go community are more likely to be working with Windows than more experienced Go developers. We interpret this as a signal that Windows-based development is important for onboarding new developers to the Go ecosystem, and is a topic our team hopes to focus on more in 2024...

While x86-compatible systems still account for the majority of development (89%), ARM64 is also now used by a majority of respondents (56%). This adoption appears to be partly driven by Apple Silicon; macOS developers are now more likely to say they develop for ARM64 than for x86-based architectures (76% vs. 71%). However, Apple hardware isn't the only factor driving ARM64 adoption: among respondents who don't develop on macOS at all, 29% still say they develop for ARM64.
The most-preferred code editors among the surveyed Go programmers were VS Code (44%), GoLand (31%), Vim/Neovim (16%), and Emacs (3%). 52% of the survey's respondents actually selected "very satisfied" for their feelings about Go — the highest possible rating.

Other interesting findings:

• " The top requests for improving toolchain warnings and errors were to make the messages more comprehensible and actionable; this sentiment was shared by developers of all experience levels, but was particularly strong among newer Go developers."

• "Three out of every four respondents work on Go software that also uses cloud services; this is evidence that developers see Go as a language for modern, cloud-based development."

• The experimental gonew tool (which offers predefined templates for instantiating new Go projects) "appears to solve critical problems for Go developers (especially developers new to Go) and does so in a way that matches their existing workflows for starting a new project. Based on these findings, we believe gonew can substantially reduce onboarding barriers for new Go developers and ease adoption of Go in organizations."

• And when it comes to AI, "Go developers said they are more interested in AI/ML tooling that improves the quality, reliability, and performance of code they write, rather than writing code for them."

AI coding assistants are here to stay -- but just how big a difference they make is still unclear. From a report: Thomas Dohmke, GitHub's CEO: "You've got a lot of tabs open, you're planning a vacation, maybe you're reading the news. At last you copy the text you need and go back to your code, but it's 20 minutes later and you lost the flow." The key idea behind Copilot and other programs like it, sometimes called code assistants, is to put the information that programmers need right next to the code they are writing.

The tool tracks the code and comments (descriptions or notes written in natural language) in the file that a programmer is working on, as well as other files that it links to or that have been edited in the same project, and sends all this text to the large language model behind Copilot as a prompt. (GitHub co-developed Copilot's model, called Codex, with OpenAI. It is a large language model fine-tuned on code.) Copilot then predicts what the programmer is trying to do and suggests code to do it. This round trip between code and Codex happens multiple times a second, the prompt updating as the programmer types. At any moment, the programmer can accept what Copilot suggests by hitting the tab key, or ignore it and carry on typing. The tab button seems to get hit a lot. A study of almost a million Copilot users published by GitHub and the consulting firm Keystone Strategy in June -- a year after the tool's general release -- found that programmers accepted on average around 30% of its suggestions, according to GitHub's user data.

[...] Copilot has changed the basic skills of coding. As with ChatGPT or image makers like Stable Diffusion, the tool's output is often not exactly what's wanted -- but it can be close. "Maybe it's correct, maybe it's not -- but it's a good start," says Arghavan Moradi Dakhel, a researcher at Polytechnique Montreal in Canada who studies the use of machine-learning tools in software development. Programming becomes prompting: rather than coming up with code from scratch, the work involves tweaking half-formed code and nudging a large language model to produce something more on point.

"Advent of Code" has begun. New programming puzzles will appear every day until Christmas at AdventOfCode.com — and the annual event (first started in 2015) has grown into a worldwide phenomenon. This year's first puzzle has been completed by over 150,000 programmers (with another 115,652 completing Day Two's puzzle). And 108,000 fans have also joined the Advent of Code subReddit.

Contest-related comments are popping up all around the web. Some participants are live streaming their puzzle-solving efforts on Twitch. Self-described computer nerd Gary Grady is tweeting cartoons about each day's puzzle. JetBrains is even giving away some prizes in their "Advent of Code with Kotlin" event. And JetBrains developer advocate Sebastian Aigner is also hosting daily livestreams about each puzzle.

It's hard to overstate how big this event has become. This year's event attracted 60 sponsors, including Kotlin (for the third consecutive year), as well as Spotify, Shopify, and Sony Interactive Entertainment (as well as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and American Express). Individual donors can get a special badge next to their name, and there's also a shop selling coffee mugs and t-shirts. But at its core is real-world developer Eric Wastl (plus a team of loyal beta-testers) sharing his genuine fondness for computer programming. Wastl is also the creator of a satirical web page for the fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework Vanilla JS ("so popular that browsers have been automatically loading it for over a decade") and also curates a collection of "things in PHP which make me sad".

And you can find him on X sharing encouraging comments for this year's participants.

"Structured concurrency is a new way to use multithreading in Java," reports InfoWorld.

"It allows developers to think about work in logical groups while taking advantage of both traditional and virtual threads." Available in preview in Java 21, structured concurrency is a key aspect of Java's future, so now is a good time to start working with it... Java's thread model makes it a strong contender among concurrent languages, but multithreading has always been inherently tricky. Structured concurrency allows you to use multiple threads with structured programming syntax. In essence, it provides a way to write concurrent software using familiar program flows and constructs. This lets developers focus on the business at hand, instead of the orchestration of threading.

As the JEP for structured concurrency says, "If a task splits into concurrent subtasks then they all return to the same place, namely the task's code block." Virtual threads, now an official feature of Java, create the possibility of cheaply spawning threads to gain concurrent performance. Structured concurrency provides the simple syntax to do so. As a result, Java now has a unique and highly-optimized threading system that is also easy to understand...

Between virtual threads and structured concurrency, Java developers have a compelling new mechanism for breaking up almost any code into concurrent tasks without much overhead... Any time you encounter a bottleneck where many tasks are occurring, you can easily hand them all off to the virtual thread engine, which will find the best way to orchestrate them. The new thread model with structured concurrency also makes it easy to customize and fine-tune this behavior. It will be very interesting to see how developers use these new concurrency capabilities in our applications, frameworks, and servers going forward.
It involves a new class StructuredTaskScope located in the java.util.concurrent library. (InfoWorld points out that "you'll need to use --enable-preview and --source 21 or --source 22 to enable structured concurrency.")

Their reporter shared an example on GitHub, and there's more examples in the Java 21 documentation. "The structured concurrency documentation includes an example of collecting subtask results as they succeed or fail and then returning the results."

The Linux Foundation's own "Open Software Security foundation" has an associated project called Alpha-Omega funded by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon with a mission to catalyze sustainable security improvements to critical open source projects and ecosystems.

It was established nearly two years ago in February of 2022 — and this month announced plans to continue supporting the Rust Foundation Security Initiative: 2022 was also the first full year of operation for the Rust Foundation — an independent nonprofit dedicated to stewarding the Rust programming language and supporting its global community. Given the considerable growth and rising popularity of the Rust programming language in recent years, it has never been more critical to have a healthy and well-funded foundation in place to help ensure the safety and security of this important language.

When the Rust Foundation emerged, OpenSSF recognized a shared vision of global open source security baked into their organizational priorities from day one. These shared security values were the driving force behind Alpha-Omega's decision to grant $460k USD to the Rust Foundation in 2022. This funding helped underwrite their Security Initiative — a program dedicated to improving the state of security within the Rust programming language ecosystem and sowing security best practices within the Rust community. The Security Initiative began in earnest this past January and has now been in operation for a full year with many achievements to note and exciting plans in development.

While security is a clear priority of the Rust language itself and can be seen in its memory safety-critical features, the Rust Project cannot reasonably be expected to foster long term, sustainable security without proper support and funding. Indeed, there is still a pervasive attitude across technology that cybersecurity is being managed and prioritized by "someone else." The unfortunate impact of this attitude is that critical security work often falls on overburdened and under-resourced open source maintainers. By prioritizing the Security Initiative during their first full year in operation, the Rust Foundation has taken on the responsibility of overseeing — and supporting — security improvements within the Rust ecosystem while ensuring meaningful progress...

Alpha-Omega is excited to announce our second year of supporting the Rust Foundation Security Initiative. We believe that this funding will build on the good work and momentum established by the Rust Foundation in 2023. Through this partnership, we are helping relieve maintainer burdens while paving an important path towards a healthier and more secure future within the Rust ecosystem.
Meanwhile, this month the Rust Foundation announced that downloads from Rust's package repository crates.io have now reached 45 billion — and that the foundation is "committed to facilitating the healthy growth of Rust through funding and resources for the community and the Project.

"After conducting initial planning and research and getting approval from our board of directors, we are pleased to announce our intention to help fulfill this commitment by developing a Rust Foundation training and certification program." We continue to be supportive of anyone creating Rust training and education materials. In fact, we are proud to have provided funding to a few individuals involved in this work via our Community Grants Program. Our team is also aware that commercial Rust training courses already exist and that global training entities are already developing their own Rust-focused programs. Given the value of Rust in professional open source, this makes sense. However, we are eager to introduce a program that will allow us to direct profits back into the Rust ecosystem.

As a nonprofit organization, we sit in a unique position thanks to the tools, connections, insights, administrative support, and resources at our disposal — all of which will add value to course material aimed at professional development and adoption. We see our forthcoming program as one tool of many that can be used to verify skills for prospective employers, and for those employers to build out their professional teams of Rust expertise. We will remain supportive of existing training programs offered by Rust Foundation member companies and we'll look for ways to ensure this remains the case as program development progresses... There is no set launch date for the Rust Foundation training and certification program yet, but we plan to continue laying high-quality groundwork in Q4 of 2023 and the first half of 2024.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hackaday: The BBC has a long history of teaching the world about computers. The broadcaster's name was proudly displayed on the BBC Micro, and BBC Basic was the programming language developed especially for that computer. Now, BBC Basic is back and running on a whole mess of modern platforms. BBC Basic for SDL 2.0 will run on Windows, MacOS, x86 Linux, and even Raspberry Pi OS, Android, and iOS. Desktop versions of the programming environment feature a BASIC editor that has syntax coloring for ease of use, along with luxury features like search and replace that weren't always available at the dawn of the microcomputer era. Meanwhile, the smartphone versions feature a simplified interface designed to work better in a touchscreen environment.

It's weird to see, but BBC Basic can actually do some interesting stuff given the power of modern hardware. It can address up to 256 MB of memory, and work with far more advanced graphical assets than would ever have been possible on the original BBC Micro. If you honed your programming skills on that old metal, you might be impressed with what they can achieve with BBC Basic in a new, more powerful context.

Slashdot reader sysadminafterdark writes: Released on November 26, 2020, PHP 8 brought many optimizations and powerful features to the language.Fast forward to today, and PHP 8 is getting the boot in favor of 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 with 8.4 in development. This leaves some websites at risk of breaking and potential security issues. Hearing of this news, I upgraded my own blog and wrote an article on how to add the Remi repository and update. I run Enterprise Linux (The best distro out there) so if you are standing up new boxes, just keep in mind the PHP in the repo is deprecated.