General Development Archive

InfoWorld's Neil McAllister takes a look at 10 cutting-edge programming languages, "each of which approaches the art of software development from a fresh perspective, tackling a specific problem or a unique shortcoming of today's more popular languages. Some are mature projects, while others are in the early stages of development. Some are likely to remain obscure, but any one of them could become the breakthrough tool that changes programming for years to come - at least, until the next batch of new languages arrives."

Orion, the Eclipse Foundation effort to build a browser based IDE, released its next milestone edition called Orion 0.4 M1, which includes improvements such as a HTML syntax validation, CodeMirror syntax highlighting, CodeMirror mixed mode syntax highlighting, CodeMirror dynamic syntax validation, a new content type service, default text editor, and lastly an HTML outliner plug-in.

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.'

"Ceylon is a programming language for writing large programs in a team environment. The language is elegant, highly readable, extremely typesafe, and makes it easy to get things done. And it's easy to learn for programmers who are familiar with mainstream languages used in business computing. Ceylon has a full-featured Eclipse-based development environment, allowing developers to take best advantage of the powerful static type system. Programs written in Ceylon execute on any JVM."

"The PyPy development team has released version 1.7 of its 'very compliant' Python interpreter with integrated tracing just-in-time compiler. The developers say that the focus of the new update was widening the range of code that PyPy can speed up, which the developers refer to as the 'sweet spot'. In their benchmarks, PyPy 1.7 performs approximately 30 per cent faster than 1.6 and 'up to 20 times faster on some benchmarks'."

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses why code analysis and similar metrics provide little insight into what really makes an effective software development team, in the wake of a new scorecard system employed at IBM. "Code metrics are fine if all you care about is raw code production. But what happens to all that code once it's written? Do you just ship it and move on? Hardly - in fact, many developers spend far more of their time maintaining code than adding to it. Do your metrics take into account time spent refactoring or documenting existing code? Is it even possible to devise metrics for these activities?" McAllister writes, "Are developers who take time to train and mentor other teams about the latest code changes considered less productive than ones who stay heads-down at their desks and never reach out to their peers? How about teams that take time at the beginning of a project to coordinate with other teams for code reuse, versus those who charge ahead blindly? Can any automated tool measure these kinds of best practices?"

A small company called AppMobi is enabling developers to create HTML5 apps that tap into native hardware and OS capabilities of mobile devices, such as gravity sensing, accelerometer, GPS, camera, sound and vibration, and the file system, InfoWorld reports. 'Its MobiUs browser for iOS implements HTML5's DirectCanvas API for gaming, as well as the HTML5 local storage API for saving executables and data in the browser cache so that apps can run offline. But what makes MobiUs more than just yet another browser is the set of libraries AppMobi provides app developers to access native hardware and enable push messaging from Web apps.'

The news already hit HackerNews late last night, but at that time there was no confirmation so I decided to wait until we knew for sure. Well, after Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs, the technology world lost another great mind yesterday. Stanford has confirmed that John McCarthy, the creator of LISP and the father of artificial intelligence, has passed away, age 84.

Just-in-time compilers, browser wars, and developer enthusiasm are just a few of the trends separating today's hot scripting languages from the pack. InfoWorld's Peter Wayner surveys programmers, commit logs, search engine traffic, and book sales data to provide a barometer of scripting languages -- JavaScript, ActionScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scala, R, and PHP -- providing a best-guess forecast of which languages are rising and falling in scripting hipness.

"Google has released an early version of Dart, a new programming language designed to take some of the pain out of developing applications for the Web. But while it's an evolutionary improvement on JavaScript, Dart faces a hard uphill battle for acceptance."

"Opa, a new opensource programming language aiming to make web development transparent has been publicly launched. Opa automatically generates client-side Javascript and handles communication and session control. The ultimate goal of this project is to allow writing distributed web applications using a single programming language to code application logics, database queries and user interfaces. Among existing applications already developed in Opa, some are worth a look. Best place to start is the project homepage which contains extensive documentation while the code of the technology is on GitHub. A programming challenge ends October 17th." This is weird. 'Opa' is the nickname my friends gave me 6 years ago. It's still used more often than my actual name...

The final ISO ballot on C++0x closed on Wednesday, and we just received the results: Unanimous approval. The next revision of C++ that we've been calling "C++0x" is now an International Standard! Geneva will take several months to publish it, but we hope it will be published well within the year, and then we'll be able to call it "C++11."

"PathScale announced today that the EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite is now available as an open source project and free download for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. This release includes documentation and the complete development stack, including compiler, debugger, assembler, runtimes and standard libraries. EKOPath is the product of years of ongoing development, representing one of the industries highest performance Intel 64 and AMD C, C++ and Fortran compilers." More here.

"The recently finished C++ ISO standard, with the working name of C++0x, is due to be published this summer, following the finishing touches to the ISO spec language and standards wonks agreed upon in March."