Category: Programming

The Swift effect: Apple’s new programming language means way more iPhone developers and apps

Swift is trying to borrow the best elements of moderately newer popular languages like Python and Javascript. “These are just more modern, colloquial languages that more developers today understand. They are easier to learn, and things don’t break as easily in them,” says Chung.

Compared to the more complex Objective-C, the drawback of these simpler languages is performance — but Apple says Swift will mean a no-compromise solution. “Swift seems like it finally gives the developers in the iOS world the ability to do the things you have been able to do in the scripting world but without the penalties,” says Daniel Doubrovkine, the head of engineering at Artsy. “That’s if it delivers on its promises, and others have promised and failed. But the fact that Apple is behind it gives me a lot of hope its the real deal.”

via The Swift effect: Apple’s new programming language means way more iPhone developers and apps | The Verge.

The Dartmouth – College celebrates half century of BASIC language

My first programming language was BASIC, and I learned it on ZX Spectrum:

330px-ZX_Spectrum+

I would like to go back, and try it out – I no longer have it. But it required connecting to the TV via the antenna cable, and downloading programs from a tape recorder cassette. Ancient times!

A series of presentations from Dartmouth faculty, students and national experts will mark the 50th anniversary of BASIC at Dartmouth.

The conference’s theme is past, present and future computing, computer science department chair Tom Cormen said. The afternoon will begin with the premiere of a documentary on the history of BASIC, created by filmmakers Bob Drake, Mike Murray and mathematics department chair Dan Rockmore.

via The Dartmouth – College celebrates half century of BASIC language.

Go 1.3’s first beta promises a sleeker, faster language

I came across Google Go when I was teaching concurrency last year (SE3BB4). I really liked the related GoDocs package present. 

Present displays slide presentations and articles. It runs a web server that presents slide and article files from the current directory. It may be run as a stand-alone command or an App Engine app. The stand-alone version permits the execution of programs from within a presentation.

Google’s Go language project, which runs at C-like speeds but allows for the dynamic development usually reserved for languages like Python, is about to enter its 1.3 revision, with a first beta soon to be made available.

Based on the currently published documentation, most of the changes in Go 1.3 don’t involve introducing new features to the language, but rather addressing many of the issues and complaints that have popped up during its few years in the wild. A few of the new features position Go as a one-stop-shop language for all things Google, including the Native Client architecture that Google has been proposing as an alternative to the “JavaScript everywhere” philosophy.

The first set of major improvements to Go 1.3 involve the linker and compiler, both significantly reworked to allow programs — especially larger ones — to compile more quickly. Google has touted Go as a way to build large distributed applications, so having less of a bottleneck on the compiler side is a boon.

via Go 1.3’s first beta promises a sleeker, faster language | Application development – InfoWorld.

Eric Allman and sendmail – nice post for programmers

Eric Allman developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley. The program was designed to deliver email over the still relatively small ARPANET network, and supports a variety of mail transfer protocols, including SMTP, ESMTP, and DECnet’s Mail-11. In 1998, he founded Sendmail, Inc.

via January 9, 2014: People of ACM: Eric Allman — Association for Computing Machinery.