Steve Springett is a conscientious senior security architect. And in 2018, he published an essay on GitHub arguing that from a security engineer's perspective, WebAssembly "increases the attack surface of any browser that supports it." Springett wrote that WebAssembly modules ar … | Continue reading
Long-time Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov shares a blog post from indie game programmer who complains "The special upload tool I had to use today was a total of 230MB of client files, and involved 2,700 different files to manage this process."Oh and BTW it gives error messages … | Continue reading
The head of the UK government's digital transformation unit recently announced a change to the nation's government services site gov.uk: they've "removed jQuery as a dependency for all frontend apps, meaning 32 KB of minified and compressed JavaScript was removed" for everything … | Continue reading
"Dallas-based Texas Instruments' latest generation of calculators is getting a modern-day update with the addition of programming language Python," reports the Dallas Morning News:The goal is to expand students' ability to explore science, technology, engineering and math through … | Continue reading
"GitHub has announced a partnership with the Stanford Law School to support developers facing takedown requests related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)," reports VentureBeat:While the DMCA may be better known as a law for protecting copyrighted works such as movies … | Continue reading
Python's creator Guido van Rossum shared his opinions on other programming languages during a new hour-long interview with Microsoft's principle cloud advocate manager. Some of the highlights: Rust: "It sounds like it's a great language — for certain things. Rust really i … | Continue reading
Results were announced this week for the fourth "official annual Python Developers Survey" of over 28,000 developers (in nearly 200 countries) conducted by the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains. 85% of the survey respondents use Python as their main programming language, I … | Continue reading
An anonymous Slashdot reader warns of a possible miscalculation: 20 years ago today, cobolreport.com publishedan article,according to which there are 30 billion Customer Information Control System/COBOL transactions per day. This number has since been cited countless times... [T] … | Continue reading
I never understood why this is an issue.*** sorry for the book below... I started writing and... well it got out of control ***Back in the 90's I worked for a bank clearing house and was coding some stuff on PC and there was an NCR mainframe which was actually so far out of suppo … | Continue reading
"The domain name perl.com was stolen and now points to an IP address associated with malware campaigns," reports Bleeping Computer:Perl.com is a site owned by Tom Christiansen and has been used since 1997 to post news and articles about the Perl programming language. On January 2 … | Continue reading
47 of Python's core developers participated in this year's Core Development Sprint, according to this report — "but what's more important is the very real and necessary community building that seemed to have taken place..."It's an especially critical time for Python, which … | Continue reading
This week saw the release of the 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results:2,049 members of the Rails community from 92 countries kindly contributed their thoughts on tools, frameworks, and workflows in their day to day development lives. From these responses we hope to get an … | Continue reading
Friday night CNET reported:With a device surgically implanted into the skull of a pig named Gertrude, Elon Musk demonstrated his startup Neuralink's technology to build a digital link between brains and computers. A wireless link from the Neuralink computing device showed the pig … | Continue reading
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes:What's up with Perl 7? Perl Foundation board member Ricardo Signes tried to sum up the state of the community in a detailed post to the "Perl 5 porters" mailing list. And in a section titled "To Break or Not To Break," he writes tha … | Continue reading
Monday we had over 550 assorted questions and comments for and about Bjarne Stroustrup. Excellent moderation (Thanks, Monday Moderators!) helped cull this mass down to 10 extremely high-quality questions Bjarne has kindly answered in amazing depth, for which he deserves a loud ro … | Continue reading
An intriguing exchange happened on the Linux Kernel Mailing List after a post by Nick Desaulniers, a Google software engineer working on compiling the Linux Kernel with Clang (and LLVM). Hackaday reports:Nick simply tested the waters for a possible future of Rust within the Linu … | Continue reading
"In December, security researchers noticed an uptick in brute-force attacks against publicly exposed Microsoft SQL servers," reports CSOnline. "It turns out the attacks go as far back as May 2018 and infect on average a couple thousand database servers every day with remote acc … | Continue reading
Microsoft had “no security measures” on a program that had humans transcribe user voice recordings from its Skype video calling service and Cortana assistant, the Guardian reported on Friday, even when those workers were located in China. | Continue reading
During a campaign event on Monday, U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden "suggested coal miners could simply learn to code to transition to 'jobs of the future,'" reports Newsweek:"Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but … | Continue reading
The Transaction Processing Performance Council is a many-decades-old nonprofit that defines transaction processing and database benchmarks and shares its performance results with the industry. Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear says they've just released some surprising news:T … | Continue reading
Matt Klein, a member of the Go steering committee recently apologized for the angst caused to some people by "the try() kerfuffle... Change is hard, but sometimes it's for the best." Tech columnist Mike Melanson covers the kerfuffle over the newly-proposed feature, while trying " … | Continue reading
"Swapnil Bhartiya, the founder of TFIR, sat down with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, to talk about the origin of the language and why he stepped down from the leadership of the very project he created," writes sfcrazy. In the interview, van Rossum emphasizes that he sti … | Continue reading
This week HackerRank reported Java is now only the second most popular programming language, finally dropping behind JavaScript in the year 2018. Now long-time Slashdot reader shanen asks about the rumors that Java is dead -- or is it? Can you convince me that Java isn't as dead … | Continue reading
Thursday a bug report complained that the source code for OpenJDK, the free and open-source implementation of Java, "has too many swear words." An anonymous reader writes:"There are many instances of swear words inside OpenJDK jdk/jdk source, scattered all over the place," reads … | Continue reading
GitHub saw more than 67 million pull requests this year -- more than a third of GitHub's "lifetime" total of 200 million pull requests since its launch in 2008. It now hosts 96 million repositories, and has over 31 million contributors -- including 8 million who just joined with … | Continue reading
What do Heartbleed, WannaCry, and million dollar iPhone bugs have in common? From a report: One bug affects iPhones, another affects Windows, and the third affects servers running Linux. At first glance these might seem unrelated, but in reality all three were made possible becau … | Continue reading
Samsung said Wednesday it was rolling out new voice-assistant features to challenge its U.S. rivals' dominance in AI. At its developer conference, where the company is also expected to unveil its first foldable smartphone, the company said it was fully opening its virtual assista … | Continue reading
"Bing has launched a new intelligent search feature which provides the exact piece of code a developer is looking for," writes Search Engine Journal. An anonymous reader quotes their report:The code snippet will appear right on the search results page itself, which means users w … | Continue reading
All the beauty of C syntax with all the conciseness of Lisp:(int main ((int argc) (char (** argv))) (sswitch ([] argv 1) (case ("a" "c") (printf "The value is \"a\" or \"c\"\n")) (case "d" (goto e-label)) (case "b" (printf "The value is \"b\"\n")) (case … | Continue reading
New submitter Fatalis writes: Substack is a venture capital funded startup for subscription-based newsletters, and it admittedly chose its name following the advice from a Paul Graham (co-founder of Y Combinator) article to prefer names not registered in the .com zone. The same n … | Continue reading
The supposed acquisition of popular code repository GitHub by Microsoft has drawn an unprecedented backlash from the developer community. Over the weekend, after Bloomberg reported that the two companies could make the announcement as soon as Monday, hundreds of developers took t … | Continue reading
Rafael Avila de Espindola is the fifth most active contributor to LLVM with more than 4,300 commits since 2006, but now he has decided to part ways with the project. From a report: Rafael posted a rather lengthy mailing list message to fellow LLVM developers today entitled I am l … | Continue reading