programming languages

On the Codeception blog there's an introduction to the Codeception tool, a behavior-driven framework written in PHP (in the spirit of Behat).

InfoWorld: "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, thank you very much."

On the CloudSpring site today there's the continuation of a previous article about RackSpace's CloudFiles API.

In this new post they show how to use their PHP SDK to connect to and use the CloudFiles service.

I have just learned that Dennis Ritchie (1941-2011) has passed away. His contributions changed the computing world.

As everyone here knows, dmr developed C, and with Brian Kernighan co-authored K&R, a book that served many of us in school and in our professional lives and remains a classic text in the field, if only for its style and elegance.

He was also one of the central figures behind UNIX.

Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011) had a profound influence on the computing world. As others discuss his many contributions and accomplishments, I think it is appropriate that we discuss how these affected programming, and consequently programming languages.

Bringing to life some of the ideas of the Mother of All Demos, Jobs had a hand in making event loops standard programming fare, and was there when Apple and NeXT pushed languages such as Objective-C and Dylan and various software frameworks, and decided to cease supporting others.

A short essay by Tom Van Cutsem, Why Programming Languages?:

When I present my research work on programming languages, people often ask me "why do you need a new programming language to solve this problem?

Why not just implement it as a library?" Or, I get asked "why didn't you implement it as an extension to {some existing language}?" In this essay I try to make explicit some of the goals and motivations behind language design.

I don't recall a discussion here on ISO/IEC TR 24772, "Guidance to avoiding vulnerabilities in programming languages through language selection and use." This report describes programming language vulnerabilities in a generic way, and is supported by language specific annexes.

An introduction to this report can be found on page 46 of this issue of the Ada User Journal (how unweb like!).

This Thursday, May 19th, MCS is hosting CompUtition!!! Come show your programming prowess! Food, prizes, and bragging rights are all a possibility!

The CompUtition is a programming competition where contestants form teams to solve programming problems. The teams to solve the most problems win prizes.

Teams can be any reasonable size, or you can work by yourself, but each team only gets to use one computer.

Most programming languages can be used, so don’t worry about that.

PHPBuilder: "The associative array -- an indispensable data type used to describe a collection of unique keys and associated values -- is a mainstay of all programming languages, PHP included.

In fact, associative arrays are so central to the task of Web development that PHP supports dozens of functions..."

This should be great news for developers who want to work with a content repository: Midgard2 just landed to Debian unstable.