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COBOL is celebrating 60 years since its specifications were signed off. Darling of Y2K consultants, the language is rapidly approaching pensionable age, but many a greybeard owes their career to it. It arose from a desire to create a language that could straddle the computers of the era. Each manufacturer had its own way of working, which, while OK if a company always stuck with one maker, made portability of programs or skills a tad tricky. If only there was, say, a COmmon Business-Oriented Language? Wouldn't that be splendid? Mary Hawes, a programmer of Burroughs machines, put forward a proposal...

On 27 April, before he burst into a San Diego synagogue and opened fire, killing one worshipper and injuring three more, the gunman said goodbye to the community that radicalised him. “It’s been real dudes,” he posted on the far-right politics board, /pol/, on the image-posting site 8chan. “I’ve only been lurking for a year and a half, yet what I’ve learned here is priceless.” The story was familiar. Six weeks earlier, a 28-year-old had killed 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Before starting his attack, he, too, had posted on 8chan’s /pol/ board. “It’s been a...

Enough with "learn to code."  As this article points out, that's terrible advice.  Coding isn't beanbag, and if you don't have a problem-solving mindset, you won't be good at it.  It's like telling people to buy power tools and become home-renovators.  Having a tool doesn't inform you about when and how to apply it. What's the problem we are trying to solve here?  Is it to meet a need for more coders or to provide a way for unemployed people to earn a good wage?  I expect that it is the latter, so let's ask: do we need more software developers and software engineers?  We already have many...

Three 15-year-old girls in Idaho have penned an open letter supporting Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when the two were teenagers. The letter, created Wednesday by teenagers who identify themselves as Layla, Charlotte and Jessica, is being driven by Change.org, a website that allows people to start and sign petitions that “call for social change.” The petition, which has a goal of 1,000 signatures, had reached 723 signatures by Thursday afternoon. In their letter, the three teens commend Ford for going public this week with her allegations. Ford...

The way Microsoft patched a recent security bug has made several security and software experts believe the company might have lost the source code to one of its Office components.Experts reached this conclusion this week after Microsoft patched a security vulnerability tracked as CVE-2017-11882 that affected EQNEDT32.EXE — the equation editor that was included with the Microsoft Office suite until 2007.While Microsoft has replaced the old EQNEDT32.EXE component with a new one in 2007, the older file is still included with all Office installations to allow users to load and edit equations created with the old component.The way Microsoft patched...

FR NOTE: This is a factual but humorous article about a not-terribly-serious GitHub software programming project. If you fancy whipping up a bondage loop under a BSDM licence this is the language you've been gagging for. Developers: bored with bracketing? Got a dose of “escaping ennui”? Why not write bad erotica instead?That's the brilliant/sick objective of a project called "Fetlang" that recently emerged on GitHub thanks to a chap called Dagan, aka “Property404”.As the repo's readme explains:“Fetlang is a statically typed, procedural, esoteric programming language and reference implementation. It is designed such that source code looks like poorly written fetish...

It is often said that in the future, jobs that were once done by humans could eventually be taken over by robots who are admittedly more efficient due to their lack of the need to rest, take breaks, and sleep. While there are some jobs that are obvious in terms of robots being better at it, there are some that are less obvious, such as the job of a programmer. However a Danish startup by the name of Ulzard Technologies IVS could change that, thanks to their development of AI dubbed pix2code that can help to program applications based on...

Last year, a longtime engineer at Facebook Inc. gathered data that revealed a controversial finding: Code written by women was rejected much more frequently than code written by their male colleagues, according to people familiar with the matter and screenshots of internal discussions viewed by The Wall Street Journal. For many female engineers at Facebook, the finding confirmed long-held suspicions that their coding faced more scrutiny than men’s. The results touched off a debate within Facebook over alleged gender bias among some of its most-valued employees: the engineers who build the features used by nearly two billion people every month....

20 Best Programming Languages In 2017 Over the years, hundreds of programming languages have come into existence. And, with the revolution of internet and the technological advances that come with it show no sign of slowing down. As a result, there are lots of companies who are on the lookout for people with right skills so that they can get the most from the digital economy and single market. It has also created promising careers for technical professionals who are looking for long-term opportunities in the software development industry.However, the digital age brings its own challenges, and not least the...

The bootcamps promise 12-week immersive training programs, but critics say high job placement numbers may not be credible. Will federal loans help or undermine credibility and costs? To many students and career-changers hoping to gain programming skills and break into the lucrative tech world, coding bootcamps can seem like a promising option. Since 2012, such bootcamps have offered hands-on, intensive technical training in as little as 12 weeks, boasting job placements as high as 98 or 99 percent once students complete the program. But while advocates pitch them as an alternative to a traditional degree program, critics point to their...

The results of Stack Overflow’s annual survey show the most popular programming languages among developers. Stack Overflow recently published the results of its annual developer survey, revealing its findings on the most popular programming languages.Over 50,000 developers from 173 countries responded to the survey.Stack Overflow said it also augmented some of the results with insights from the activity of its 40 million monthly visitors.It found that JavaScript remains the most popular technology among developers, with SQL and SQL Server a close second.“PHP appears to be falling out of favour as Node and Angular emerge,” said Stack Overflow. Most popular tech...

across the UK today as part of digital literacy initiative Almost one million school children across the UK will today receive their very own micro computer thanks to a “landmark” BBC initiative. Every Year 7 student in England and Wales, Year 8 student in Northern Ireland and S1 student in Scotland will be handed, for free, a BBC micro:bit computer specially designed to help pupils learn to code. The pocket-sized micro:bit is part of the BBC’s Make it Digital initiative, and aims to get schoolchildren and teachers alike of all abilities learn the basics of making computer programs by teaching...

I have an idea for a brilliant, sarcastic Conservative phone app called "Happy Safe Space Filter" that would be a wonderfully hot ticket with Conservatives, and/or Sarcastic Teenagers. It could either be a freebie for the Cause, or in true Capitalist fashion, would probably sell well at 99 cents. (The joke works I a lot of ways, but would include a little body copy crediting Conservatives.) I claim the idea and would be willing to give it up for 10% of gross. It is a pretty simple thing. If you have App writing experience, please message me here on Free...

The Python Programming Language is rising in popularity in Tiobe's monthly language index, reaching an all-time high of fourth place this month, up from fifth place last month. The language now has a rating of 4.429 percent, an increase of more than 2 percent from a year ago, when it was ranked eighth. "[Python is] easy to learn, available everywhere, and embraced by industry. Python is the current standard in scripting," a report accompanying the index said. Tiobe uses a formula involving searches on popular search engines to gauge language popularity. In an email, Paul Jansen, managing director at Tiobe,...

C# is making its way past Java as the most popular programming language in the workplace, according to SD Times readers.While Java sits on top of the TIOBE Programming Community index for August 2015, with C# coming in at No. 4, our latest poll shows C# is the No. 1 language used in the workplace, with Java and C/C++ following.Out of 1,166 votes, 37% of developers voted for C#, 20% voted for Java, and 17% voted for C/C++. The least-popular programming languages used at work, according to the poll, included Python/Ruby/Perl and Objective-C/Swift.A more detailed breakdown of the poll...

As humans, we make intuitive choices every day about how to empty the bin, sort laundry or the best way to get to work.  But robots have a far more difficult time choosing from a never-ending list of possible actions.  To make robots respond in a more human-like way to tasks, researchers have developed an algorithm and are teaching machines to use it through an unlikely source - playing Minecraft. The algorithm was developed by computer scientists at Brown University.  It is designed to help robots better plan their actions in complex environments and use these skills in the real...

The apps and games you use every day don't exist in a vacuum — someone, somewhere, wrote the code. That also goes for the underlying platforms and hardware that those apps run on. And the web. And the entire Internet itself. Even the programming languages that people use to build this stuff first had to be written by somebody else. So who's at the top of the programming pyramid? 1) Linus Torvalds created Linux, a free operating system, in his dorm room at the University of Helsinki. Today, Linux is the operating system of choice for data centers, supercomputers, and...

Researchers have shown that machines are inching closer to self-learning, and perhaps even copping a little attitude. Over at Google, a computer program using a database of movie scripts was asked again and again by researchers to define morality. It struggles to do so, and in a conversation recorded by its human engineers, becomes exasperated and ends the conversation by lashing out at its human inquisitor. Here’s part of the exchange, as related in a paper presented this week: Human: Tell me the definition of morality. Machine: I don’t have ethics. Human: Look, I need help; I need to know...

"Software is eating the world," venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously declared. Someone has to write that software. Why not you? There are thousands of programming languages, but some are far more popular than others. When a company goes out to find new programming talent, they're looking for people familiar with the languages and systems they already use — and they don't always want to experiment with newcomers like Google Go or Apple Swift. Here are the programming languages you should learn if you always want to have a job, as suggested by the popular TIOBE Index and Redmonk Programming Language...

Menuet's kernel includes pre-emptive multitasking support and the super-compact operating system includes an impressive GUI MenuetOS, a GUI-toting, x86-based operating system written entirely in assembly language, has hit version 1.0. The milestone comes after almost a decade and a half of development for the operating system, which despite having an impressive graphical user interface is still compact enough to fit on a floppy disk (assuming you can find one). The 32-bit version of the system is released as open source until the GPL, while the 64-bit version is free for personal and educational use (commercial use requires negotiating with the...