Category: Programming

The best engineering interview question I’ve ever gotten, Part 1 – Arthur O’Dwyer – Stuff mostly about C++

It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of a software engineering interview. But I still remember my favorite interview question. It was at MemSQL circa 2013.

This blog post discusses a programming challenge from a software engineering interview. memcached, an in-memory key-value store, provides a built-in way to atomically add k to a number, but it doesn’t provide other arithmetic operations – there is no ‘atomic multiply by k’ operation. The challenge required interviewees to add a `mult` command to memcached. The challenge is well calibrated for interviews as there is only one correct answer and it is also a good representation of what most real-world programming is like.

Source: The best engineering interview question I’ve ever gotten, Part 1 – Arthur O’Dwyer – Stuff mostly about C++

Top programming languages: Java takes an unexpected leap forwards | ZDNet

There’s no shortage of software developer jobs right now and employers are on the lookout for Python, Java and SQL coders in particular, hiring data indicates – with Go also catching the eye of recruiters.

Developer training platform CodingDojo scoured job ads on careers website Indeed to find out which programming languages are in highest demand in 2022.

It found that Python, Java, SQL and JavaScript appeared the most frequently in developer job ads, each appearing in more than 50,000 listings on Indeed. All four saw a significant jump in demand compared to 2020-2021, said CodingDojo: “This makes plenty of sense considering the U.S. economy alone has seen more jobs created in 2021 than any other year on record. While recovery from the events of March 2020 took some time – and in many respects is still happening – computer programming jobs have come back and then some.”

Source: Top programming languages: Java takes an unexpected leap forwards | ZDNet

This tech job has just been crowned the best in the country | ZDNet

Tech and STEM-related jobs offer the best opportunity for jobhunters and career-switchers to find satisfaction in their work, according to new careers data from Glassdoor.

Glassdoor’s 25 Best Jobs List for 2022 found that software developers, data scientists, IT architects and full-stack engineers dominate the top spots when measured by salary, job satisfaction and the number of job openings.

These three factors were taken from ratings from “hundreds of thousands” of employee reviews on the Glassdoor platform, which were combined with the number of role vacancies to create an overall ‘job score’.

Source: This tech job has just been crowned the best in the country | ZDNet

Programming languages: This old favourite tops the charts again | ZDNet

What’s the top programing language? Is it JavaScript for the web? Or do data scientists rule the roost these days with Python? No. According to Swiss software house, Tiobe, the nearly 50-year old language C is the top language today. C hails from Bell Labs and was created nearly 50 years ago, back in 1972, by American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie. He also co-created the Unix operating system.

Source: Programming languages: This old favourite tops the charts again | ZDNet

Top Programming Languages 2020 – IEEE Spectrum

It would be an understatement to say it’s been a turbulent year since the last time IEEE Spectrum broke out the digital measuring tools to probe the relative popularity of programming languages. Yet one thing remains constant: the dominance of Python.

Since it’s impossible for even the most aggressive spy agency in the world to find out what language every single programmer uses when they sit down at their keyboards—especially the ones tapping away on retro computers or even programmable calculators—we rely on combining 11 metrics from online sources that we think are good proxies for the popularity of 55 languages.

Because different programmers have different interests and needs, our online rankings are interactive, allowing you to weight the metrics as you see fit. Think one measure is way more valuable than the others? Max it out. Disagree with us about the worth of another? Turn it off. We have a number of preset rankings that focus on things such as emerging languages or what jobs employers are looking to fill (big thanks to CareerBuilder for making it possible to query their database this year, now that it’s no longer accessible using a public application programming language).

Source: Top Programming Languages 2020 – IEEE Spectrum

Developers say Google’s Go is ‘most sought after’ programming language of 2020

Lots of developers really want to learn Go, a programming language for large systems created by Google, meanwhile most developers are sick of attending meetings, and most of those working at multinational corporations aren’t happy there.

That’s according to the results of a survey of over 16,655 developers from 76 countries carried out by HackerEarth, a company with offices in India and San Francisco that provides tools for recruiters to remotely assess developer coding skills.

Source: Developers say Google’s Go is ‘most sought after’ programming language of 2020 | ZDNet

Simulation of a Pandemic

I followed @realjasonisaacs for his data gathering and analysis of COVID-19 in Ventura County. I wrote a simple Python3 script (using graphics.py) that provides a visualization of the pandemic. The simulation has a few parameters, but it is essentially a simulation of people’s random but relatively confined movements. It starts with one sick individual in the center, and a population of 300 healthy individuals. What was surprising was how easily I was able to simulate the situations presented by Jason Isaacs (e.g., exponential versus logistic growth) with my simple code. See a recording of a run of a typical development of the pandemic.

14 most popular programming languages according to Stack Overflow study

Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer site for global programmers, has released its 2018 report on the most popular programming languages based on responses from over 100,000 developers. The top language cited is Javascript, which allows developers to build interactive elements on websites, making it one of the most common languages on the Web. HTML, while technically a markup language rather than a programming language, placed second in the ranking, as it forms the basis of all Websites. Third on the list was Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, used to design Websites and browser-based apps. Structured Query Language (SQL), which allows users to handle large amounts of data by accessing and managing databases, placed fourth in the ranking, followed by Java, the most common tool for building Android apps. Following Java in the ranking were, in descending order, Bash/Shell, Python, C#, PHP, C++, C, Typescript, Ruby, and Swift.

Source: 14 most popular programming languages according to Stack Overflow study – Business Insider

C language completes comeback in programming popularity

The once-declining C language has completed a comeback in the monthly Tiobe Index of language popularity, winning the 2017 Programming Language of the Year designation from Tiobe as the biggest gainer in share.

Although the language only grew 1.69 percentage points in its rating year over year in the January index, that was enough beat out runners-up Python (1.21 percent gain) and Erlang (0.98 percent gain). Just five months ago, C was at its lowest-ever rating, at 6.477 percent; this month, its rating is 11.07 percent, once again putting it in second place behind Java (14.215 percent)—although Java dropped 3.05 percent compared to January 2017. C’s revival is possibly being fueled by its popularity in manufacturing and industry, including the automotive market, Tiobe believes.

The Tiobe Programming Language of the Year for 2016 was Google’s Go language (Golang). Tiobe, which provides software quality services, bases its rankings on a formula assessing searches on languages in popular search engines such as Google, Bing, and Wikipedia.

Other languages that saw jumps in 2017 included R, which rose from 16th to 8th place; Kotlin, which jumped to 39th place after being in 89th a year earlier, and Erlang, which placed 23rd after being in 44th place a year ago.

But promising languages such as Julia, Hack, Rust, and Kotlin were not able to reach the top 20 or even the top 30, Tiobe pointed out. “Becoming part of the top 10 or even the top 20 requires a large ecosystem of communities and evangelists including conferences,” said Paul Jansen, Tiobe managing director and compiler of the index. “This is not something that can be developed in one year’s time.”

The top-rated languages in the index this month were as follows:

Java (14.215 percent)
C (11.037 percent)
C++ (5.603 percent)
Python (4.678 percent)
C# (3.754 percent)
JavaScript (3.465 percent)
Visual Basic .Net (3.261 percent)
R (2.549 percent)
PHP (2.532 percent)
Perl (2.419 percent)

Source: C language completes comeback in programming popularity | InfoWorld