"To teach the next generation of computer scientists the basics of Python programming, Microsoft recently announced a partnership with NASA to create a series of lessons based on space exploration efforts," reports TechRepublic: Overall, the project includes three different NASA-inspired lessons... The Introduction to Python for Space Exploration lesson will provide students with "an introduction to the types of space exploration problems that Python and data science can influence." Made up of eight units in total, this module also details the upcoming Artemis lunar exploration mission.

In another learning path, students will learn to design an AI model capable of classifying different types of space rocks depicted in random photos, according to Microsoft. However, the company recommends a "basic understanding of Python for Data Science" as a prerequisite for this particular lesson. The last of the three learning paths serves as an introduction to machine learning and demonstrates ways these technologies can help assist with space exploration operations.

Students are presented real-world NASA challenges, particularly rocket launch delays, and learn how the agency can leverage machine learning to resolve the issues... Microsoft also announced partnerships with Wonder Woman 1984 and Smithsonian Learning Labs to curate five additional programming lessons for students.

"To celebrate Java's 25th anniversary this year and the latest release of Java 15, JetBrains has compiled data from multiple sources to look at what the current state of the language," reports SD Times: The largest concentration of Java developers is in Asia, where 2.5 million developers use it as their primary language. JetBrains believes this may be due to the fact that it is common to hire offshore developers in countries like China and India to build Android apps. "We might have expected the USA to have a high percentage of Java users, but it also makes a lot of sense that they don't. There is a big technology stack to choose from and often a lot of the tech companies are at the forefront of that stack, so it could be that developers there don't need the power or stability of Java and are using languages that allow them to build and test quickly," JetBrains wrote in a post.
The post on JetBrains notes that the six countries with the highest percentage of developers using Java as their primary language are: China, South Korea, India, Germany, Spain, and Brazil: The reasons Java is most likely so popular in the first 6 countries include the free use of Java, governmental support, and open-source... Germany is also very high which could be attributed to Java being the most popular language in Germany for software engineers as it is used to build highly scalable applications for a multitude of industries. Most enterprise services rely on Java to power the applications that enable the day-to-day running of businesses, such as payroll, inventory management, reporting, and so on. Germany also has a big financial sector that uses Java heavily for their homegrown tech, such as trading bots, retail banking systems, and other applications that the finance industry requires in order to remain competitive...

According to the State of the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2020, more than a third of professional developers use Java as a primary language and Java remains the second primary language among professional developers after JavaScript. Expert analysis: It is not surprising to see JavaScript and Java taking the leading positions as they are kind of paired together; developers who work with Java often write their frontend and any quick scripts in JavaScript. Python is probably third place due to the spread of machine learning. In general, we expect the web to be a big part of the developer ecosystem and so JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and PHP will always have solid standing. SQL is also always going to be around as there isn't much that doesn't require databases in some capacity. C++ is also kind of a solid language in that it is used for a lot of embedded applications, so it won't be disappearing off the charts any time soon. C# though seems to be losing ground, and I guess if Java is high then C# will be low, as they are both very similar in terms of capabilities.

As to why I think Java is so high in the sphere of professional development — it's similar to what was mentioned about Germany. Most enterprise business services rely on Java to make them tick along. It's not just the IT sector either — almost every company, be it in distribution, manufacturing, or banking, has IT services as part of their infrastructure, and these services, such as payroll or inventory management, are generally built with Java in the backend. So Java is used a lot by professional developers who work for these companies.

"A Raspberry Pi, a USB SDR dongle, an LCD a buzzer and a little bit of coding in Python and C has created a very useful alarm for drone and RC model aircraft operators," explains long-time Slashdot reader NewtonsLaw . The device allows users to set an "alarm" perimeter around their operating area and automatically alert them whenever a manned aircraft with ADSB fitted intrudes into that area. While there are apps like FlightRadar24 that allow you to monitor ADSB-equipped air traffic, this is the first stand-alone hand-held unit that isn't reliant on cellular or Wifi data and which not just monitors aircraft movments but also sounds an alarm according to user-defined parameters.
sUAS News reports: "As an avid proponent of safety within the drone and RC communities, I decided to put my background in electronics engineering and computer software to good use by developing a device that has the potential to ensure the skies remain safe," said Kiwi drone and RC model enthusiast Bruce Simpson.

"The alarm I've developed is not a silver bullet but it is an extremely valuable tool for improving safety... I will be publishing some DIY videos showing people how they can build their own from readily available parts. This will ensure it remains cheap enough to be used by everyone..."

Drone users now call on the manned aviation community to ensure that they play their part by equipping their aircraft with the ADSB technology that has become such an important part of safety in the 21 st century.

ZDNet reports: Oracle has released version 15 of Java, the language created 25 years ago by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems, which Oracle snapped up in 2009 for about $7.4bn to gain what it said was the "most important software Oracle has ever acquired". Java 15, or Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) 15, brings the Edwards-Curve digital signature algorithm, hidden classes, and former preview features that have been finalized, including text blocks, and the Z Garbage Collector, while the sealed-classes feature arrives and pattern matching and records emerge as a second preview...

In July, Java fell out of RedMonk's top two positions for the first time since 2012 and now resides behind JavaScript and Python in terms of popularity. Tiobe in September ranked Java in second position, behind C and ahead of Python.... But Java is still hugely popular and widely used in the enterprise, according to Oracle, which notes it is used by over 69% of full-time developers worldwide... It counts Arm, Amazon, IBM, Intel, NTT Data, Red Hat, SAP and Tencent among its list of notable contributors to JDK 15. Oracle also gave a special mention to Microsoft and cloud system monitoring service DataDog for fixes...

As part of Java's 25th anniversary, Oracle commissioned analyst firm Omdia to assess its six-month release strategy for Java and whether it would be enough to keep millions of Java developers away from memory-safe alternatives such as Kotlin, the language Google has endorsed for Android development, and Rust, a system programming language that was created at Mozilla. "In Omdia's opinion, the work Oracle began a few years ago in moving to a six-month update cycle and introducing a new level of modularity, puts the vendor in good stead with its constituency of approximately 12 million developers," Oracle said in its report on Omdia's analysis.

"However, Oracle and the Java programming language need an ongoing series of innovative, must-have, and 'delightful' features that make the language even more user friendly and cloud capable. These will keep existing Java developers happy while steering potential Java developers away from newer languages like Rust and Kotlin."

This week brings a special event honoring the IBM Z line of mainframes, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp: As part of this week's IBM Z Day event, looking-for-young-blood IBM is teaming up with tech-backed K-12 CS nonprofits Code.org and CSforALL and calling on students 14-and-up to Master The Mainframe during the 24-hour code-a-thon to open doors to new opportunities with Fortune 500 companies.

"The rewards for participants are substantial," explains Big Blue. "For every student who finishes Level 1, IBM will donate to the UN World Food Programme #ShareTheMeal... In celebration of IBM Z day, we will double the donation for all students that complete Master the Mainframe Level 1 between Sept 15 — 30 2020. Just 1 hour of your time will feed 4 children for a day." "Through three interactive Levels, you will access a mainframe and get skilled up on the foundations of Mainframe," according to IBM's announcement at MasterTheMainframe.com, "including JCL, Ansible, Python, Unix, COBOL, REXX, all through VS Code. Round it all out with a grand challenge where you craft your own fully-equipped Mainframe creation."

"One mainframe is equivalent to 1,500 x86 servers," the site notes. It also points out that mainframes handle 30 billion transactions every day, "more than the number of Google searches every day" — including 87% of all credit card transactions, nearly $8 trillion payments a year.

Earlier today, quantum computing startup Xanadu launched its quantum cloud platform, where developers can access the company's gate-based photonic quantum processors with 8-qubit or 12-qubit chips, with 24-qubit chips coming "in the next month of so." "The startup expects to 'roughly double' the number of qubits available in its cloud every six months," reports VentureBeat. "The hope is Xanadu Quantum Cloud will let businesses, developers, and researchers build novel solutions to problems in finance, quantum chemistry, machine learning, and graph analytics." From the report: Quantum computing leverages qubits (unlike bits that can only be in a state of 0 or 1, qubits can also be in a superposition of the two) to perform computations that would be much more difficult for a classical computer. Based in Toronto, Canada, Xanadu has been developing quantum computers based on photonics since its founding in September 2016. The choice of technology means Xanadu's quantum processors operate at room temperature (most other examples of quantum computing tech have to be cooled to very low temperatures) and can be integrated into existing fiber optic-based telecommunication infrastructure.

Xanadu is best known for the development of PennyLane, an open source software library for quantum machine learning, quantum computing, and quantum chemistry. The company also develops Strawberry Fields, its cross-platform Python library for simulating and executing programs on quantum photonic hardware. Both open source tools are available on GitHub, and they have a growing community fostering tutorials and educational materials for anyone interested in developing and experimenting with quantum applications.

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's brain activity as it snuffled around a pen on stage Friday night.
Some reactions from Twitter:

- "The potential of #Neuralink is mind-boggling, but fuckkkk why would they use Bluetooth???"

- "they're using C/C++ too lmao"

But then videogame programming legend John Carmack responded: "Quality, reliable software can be delivered in any language, but language choice has an impact. For me, C would be a middle-of-the-road choice; better than a dynamic language like javascript or python, but not as good as a more modern strongly static typed languages.

However, the existence of far more analysis tools for C is not an insignificant advantage. If you really care about robustness, you are going to architect everything more like old Fortran, with no dynamic allocations at all, and the code is going to look very simple and straightforward.

So an interesting question: What are the aspects of C++ that are real wins for that style over C? Range checked arrays would be good. What else?
When asked "What's a better modern choice?" Carmack replied "Rust would be the obvious things, and I don't have any reason to doubt it would be good, but I haven't implemented even a medium sized application in it."

But then somewhere in the discussion, Elon Musk made a joke about C's lack of "class" data structures. Elon Musk responded: I like C, because it avoids class warfare
But then Musk also gave interesting responses to two more questions on Twitter: Which is your fav programming language? Python?

Elon Musk: Actually C, although the syntax could be improved esthetically

Could Neuralink simulate an alternate reality that could be entered at will, like Ready Player One? Implications for VR seem to be massive. Essentially, a simulation within a simulation if we're already in one ...

Elon Musk: Later versions of a larger device would have that potential

The open-source project behind Julia, a programming language for data scientists, has revealed which languages users would shift to if they decided no longer to use Julia. From a report: Julia, a zippy programming language that has roots at MIT, has published the results of its 2020 annual user survey. The study aims to uncover the preferences of those who are building programs in the language. [...] Last year, 73% of Julia users said they would use Python if they weren't using Julia, but this year 76% nominated Python as the other language. MATLAB, another Julia rival in statistical analysis, saw its share of Julia users as a top alternative language drop from 35% to 31% over the past year, but C++ saw its share on this metric rise from 28% to 31%. Meanwhile, R, a popular statistical programming language with a dedicated crowd, also declined from 27% to 25%.

Want a movie where a protagonist your age, race, sexuality, gender, and religion becomes an Olympic swimmer? You got it. Want a movie where someone demographically identical to your boss gets squeezed to death and devoured by a Burmese python? Your wish is its command. From a report: Want to leave out the specifics and let fate decide what never-before-imagined movie will be entertaining you this evening? Black Box has you covered. After you make your choices -- and of course pay a nominal fee for the serious computational heavy lifting necessarily involved -- your order is received at Black Box HQ, and an original movie will be on its way shortly.

Black Box converts your specifications into data -- or if you didn't ask for anything specific, a blob of randomly generated numerical noise will do -- and the creation process can begin. That first collection of ones and zeros will become a prompt, and will be fed into a type of A.I. called a transformer, which will spit out the text screenplay for your movie through a process a little like the autocomplete function on your smartphone. That screenplay will then be fed into a variation on today's vector quantized variational autoencoders -- neural nets that generate music, basically -- producing chopped up little bits of sound that, when strung together, form an audio version of the spoken dialogue and sound effects in your custom movie, plus an orchestral score. Finally, in the most challenging part of the process, those 90 minutes of audio, along with the screenplay, get fed into the world's most sophisticated GAN, or generative adversarial network. Working scene by scene, the Black Box GAN would generate a cast of live action characters -- lifelike humans, or at least human-esque avatars -- built from the ground up, along with all of the settings, monsters, car chases, dogs, cats, and little surprises that make it feel like a real movie.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp tells us Netherlands-based scientist Felienne Hermans shared a radical idea at the 2020 ACM International Computing Education Research Conference for a new programming language to be used for teaching coding -- and for teaching Python: Hermans — an associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science — observes In her ICER presentation on Hedy that we don't overwhelm children who are beginning to learn to read with the messy rules of capitalization, punctuation, and sentence construction. So why do we think kids unfamiliar with programming concepts will be able to deal from the get-go with the chock-full-of-syntax-challenges presented by even a "simple" Python loop?

Hedy (proof-of-concept beta) attempts to reduce cognitive load by introducing programming with different "levels" that gradually and gently introduce children to new commands and increasingly complex syntax. Hedy, Hermans explains in a paper, is "a gradual language with an increasingly complex syntax, based on how punctuation is taught to novice readers in natural language education."

O'Reilly media's Vice President of Content Strategy (also the coauthor of Unix Power Tools) recently explored why several popular programming languages wound up on the "most dreaded" list in StackOverflow's annual developer survey: There's no surprise that VBA is #1 disliked language. I'll admit to complete ignorance on Objective C (#2), which I've never had any reason to play with. Although I'm a Perl-hater from way back, I'm surprised that Perl is so widely disliked (#3), but some wounds never heal. It will be interesting to see what happens after Perl 7 has been out for a few years. Assembly (#4) is an acquired taste (and isn't a single language)...
But he eventually suggests that both C and Java might be on the list simply because they have millions of users, citing a quote from C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup: "there are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." Dislike of a language may be "guilt by association": dislike of a large, antiquated codebase with minimal documentation, and an architectural style in which every bug fixed breaks something else. Therefore, it's not surprising to see languages that used to be widely used but have fallen from popularity on the list... Java has been the language people love to hate since its birth. I was at the USENIX session in which James Gosling first spoke about Java (way before 1.0), and people left the room talking about how horrible Java was — none of whom had actually used the language because it hadn't been released yet...

If there's one language on this list that's associated with gigantic projects, it's Java. And there are a lot of things to dislike about it — though a lot of them have to do with bad habits that grew up around Java, rather than the language itself. If you find yourself abusing design patterns, step back and look at what you're doing; making everything into a design pattern is a sign that you didn't understand what patterns are really for... If you start writing a FactoryFactoryFactory, stop and take a nice long walk. If you're writing a ClassWithAReallyLongNameBecauseThatsHowWeDoIt, you don't need to. Java doesn't make you do that... I've found Java easier to read and understand than most other languages, in part because it's so explicit — and most good programmers realize that they spend more time reading others' code than writing their own.
He also notes that Python only rose to #23 on the "most dreaded" languages list, speculating developers may appreciation its lack of curly braces, good libraries, and Jupyter notebooks. "Python wins the award for the most popular language to inspire minimal dislike. It's got a balanced set of features that make it ideal for small projects, and good for large ones."

"And what shall we say about JavaScript, sixteenth on the list? I've got nothing. It's a language that grew in a random and disordered way, and that programmers eventually learned could be powerful and productive... A language that's as widely used as JavaScript, and that's only 16th on the list of most dreaded languages, is certainly doing something right. But I don't have to like it."

InfoWorld's senior writer calls Python a "living language," citing its recent addition of the "walrus operator" for in-line assignments and the newly-approved pattern matching.

"And they're only two of a slew of useful features that could be added to Python to make the language more expressive, more powerful, more suited to the modern programming world. What else might we wish for?" True constants - Python doesn't really have the concept of a constant value... [E]very time a name is used, Python goes to the trouble of looking up what object it's pointing at. This dynamism is one of the chief reasons Python runs more slowly than some other languages. Python's dynamism offers great flexibility and convenience, but it comes at the cost of runtime performance. One advantage of having true constant declarations in Python would be some reduction in the frequency of object lookups that take place during runtime, and thus better performance. If the runtime knows ahead of time that a given value never changes, it doesn't have to look up its bindings...

True overloading and generics - In many languages, multiple versions of the same function can be written to work with different kinds of input... PEP 3124, advanced in April 2007, proposed a mechanism for decorating functions to indicate they could be overloaded. The proposal was deferred rather than being rejected outright — meaning the idea was fundamentally sound, but the time wasn't right to implement it. One factor that might speed the adoption of overloading in Python — or cause the idea to be ditched entirely — is the implementation of the newly proposed pattern matching system.

In theory, pattern matching could be used under the hood to handle overload dispatch. However, pattern matching could also be given as a rationale for not implementing generics in Python, since it already provides an elegant way to dispatch operations based on type signatures. So we might get true overloading in Python one day, or its advantages might be superseded by other mechanisms.
The article lists two more features Python "probably won't get" — starting with multiline lambdas (anonymous functions). Guido van Rossum had argued in 2006 he couldn't find an acceptable syntax, and the article argues "there is probably no way to do it that doesn't involve creating a special case." And it argues the final missing feature is tail recursion optimizations, "where functions that call themselves don't create new stack frames in the application, and thus risk blowing up the stack if they run for too long.

"Python doesn't do this, and in fact its creators have consistently come out against doing so."

"Programming language Python is now firmly the second most popular programming language, for the first time knocking Java out of the top two places in RedMonk's language popularity rankings," reports ZDNet: It's the first time since 2012 that Java is not one of the top two most popular languages in the developer analyst firm's programming language popularity list. The company's previous rankings in March placed machine-learning propelled Python in a tie for second place with Java, behind JavaScript.

RedMonk's influential programming popularity rankings are based on GitHub and Stack Overflow data. The company combines them "for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction", says RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady, who notes "all numerical rankings should be taken with a grain of salt....

"Python is the first non-Java or JavaScript language ever to place in the top two of these rankings by itself, and would not have been the obvious choice for that distinction in years past," O'Grady notes, comparing it to Perl in its heyday because it has become a "language of first resort" and the "glue" for thousands of small projects, while enjoying high adoption in growing categories such as data science...

Five-year-old systems-programming language Rust, created by Mozilla, has hit a more positive milestone, for the first time becoming the 20th most popular language in RedMonk's rankings.
Last week IEEE Spectrum also declared Python "dominated" their assessment of language popularity (compiled from 11 different online metrics), followed by Java and C (and then C++ and JavaScript).

Cloudflare today announced the private beta launch of Workers Unbound, the latest step in its efforts to offer a serverless platform that can compete with the likes of AWS Lambda. TechCrunch reports: The company first launched its Workers edge computing platform in late 2017. Today it has "hundreds of thousands of developers" who use it, and in the last quarter alone, more than 20,000 developers built applications based on the service, according to the company. Cloudflare also uses Workers to power many of its own services, but the first iteration of the platform had quite a few limitations. The idea behind Workers Unbound is to do away with most of those and turn it into a platform that can compete with the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google. Cloudflare aims to expose to third-party developers all of the services it builds for its internal consumption. The original Workers service will continue to operate (but under the Workers Bundled moniker) and essentially become Cloudflare's serverless platform for basic workloads that only run for a very short time. Workers Unbound -- as the name implies -- is meant for more complex and longer-running processes.

When it first launched Workers, the company said that its killer feature was speed. Today, [CEO Matthew Prince] argues that speed obviously remains an important feature -- and Cloudflare Workers Unbound promises that it essentially does away with cold-start latencies. But developers also adopted the platform because of its ability to scale and its price. Indeed, Workers Unbound, Cloudflare argues, is now significantly more affordable than similar offerings. "For the same workload, Cloudflare Workers Unbound can be 75% percent less expensive than AWS Lambda, 24 percent less expensive than Microsoft Azure Functions, and 52 percent less expensive than Google Cloud Functions," the company says in today's press release.

Another feature Prince highlighted is regulatory compliance. "I think the thing we're realizing as we talk to our largest enterprise customers is that for real companies -- not just the individual developer hacking away at home -- but for real businesses in financial services or anyone who has to deal with a regulated industry, the only thing that trumps ease of use is regulatory compliance, which is not sexy or interesting or anything else but like if your GC says you can't use XYZ platform, then you don't use XYZ platform and that's the end of the story," Prince noted. Speed, though, is of course something developers will always care about. Prince stressed that the team was quite happy with the 5ms cold-start times of the original Workers platform. The way the team engineered this is by queuing up the process while the two servers are still negotiating their TLS handshake. Cloudflare also argues that developers can update their code and have it go live globally within 15 seconds. Another area the team worked on was making it easier to use the service in general. Among the key new features here is support for languages like Python and a new SDK that will allow developers to add support for their favorite languages, too.

IEEE Spectrum's August issue will include an article titled "The Top Programming Languages."

Calculated using metrics from 11 online sources, it concludes that "One thing remains constant: the dominance of Python." Our default ranking is weighted toward the interests of an IEEE member, and looking at the top entries, we see that Python has held onto its comfortable lead, with Java and C once again coming in second and third place, respectively. Arduino has seen a big jump, rising from 11th place to seventh. (Purists may argue that Arduino is not a language but rather a hardware platform that is programmed using a derivative of Wiring, which itself is derived from C/C++. But we have always taken a very pragmatic approach to our definition of "programming language," and the reality is that when people are looking to use an Arduino-compatible microcontroller, they typically search for "Arduino code" or buy books about "Arduino programming," not "Wiring code" or "C programming.")

One interpretation of Python's high ranking is that its metrics are inflated by its increasing use as a teaching language: Students are simply asking and searching for the answers to the same elementary questions over and over. There's an historical parallel here. In the 1980s, BASIC was very visible... But few professional programmers used it, and when the home computer bubble burst, so did BASIC's, although some advanced descendants like Microsoft Visual Basic are still relatively popular professionally.

There are two counterarguments, though: The first is that students are people, too! If we pay attention only to what professional and expert coders do, we're at risk of missing an important part of the picture. The second is that, unlike BASIC, Python is frequently used professionally and in high-profile realms, such as machine learning, thanks to its enormous collection of high quality, specialized libraries.
C++ came in fourth, followed by JavaScript, R, "Arduino," Go, Swift, and Matlab.

But because different programmers have different needs, they've also created a special interactive version of their rankings online, "allowing you to weight the metrics as you see fit... "

SUSE has released the next versions of its flagship operating system, SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 Service Pack 2 and its latest infrastructure management program, SUSE Manager 4.1. ZDNet reports: SLE 15 SP2 is available on the x86-64, Arm, IBM POWER, IBM Z, and LinuxONE hardware architectures. This new Linux server edition is based on the Linux 5.3 kernel. This new kernel release includes upstream features such as utilization clamping support in the task scheduler, and power-efficient userspace waiting. Other new and noteworthy features include:

- Support for migration from openSUSE Leap to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). With this, you can try the free, community openSUSE Linux distro, and then, if you find it's a good choice for your business, upgrade to SLES.
- Extended Package Search. By using the new Zypper, SUSE's command line package manager, command option -- zypper search-packages -- sysadmins can now search across all SUSE repositories, even unenabled ones. This makes it easier for administrators to find required software packages.
- SLE Software Development Kit (SDK) is now integrated into SLE. Development packages are packaged alongside regular packages. - Python 3: SLE 15 offers full support for Python 3 development. SLE still supports Python 2 for the time being.
- 389 Directory Server replaces OpenLDAP as the LDAP directory service.
- Repository Mirroring Tool (RMT) replaces Subscription Management Tool (SMT). RMT allows mirroring SUSE repositories and custom repositories. You can then register systems directly with RMT. In environments with tightened security, RMT can also proxy other RMT servers.
- Better business continuity with improved SLE Live Patching. SUSE claims Live Patching increases system uptime by up to 12 months. SLE Live Patching is also now available for IBM Z and LinuxONE mainframe architectures.

As for SUSE Manager 4.1, this is an improved open-source infrastructure management and automation solution that lowers costs, identifies risk, enhances availability, and reduces complexity in edge, cloud, and data center environments. With SUSE Manager you can keep servers, VMs, containers, and clusters secure, healthy, compliant, and low maintenance whether in private, public, or hybrid cloud. That's especially important these days thanks to coronavirus pandemic IT staff disruptions. SUSE Manager 4.1 can also be used with the Salt DevOps program. Its vertical-market brother, SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1, is optimized and tailored specifically for retail. This release comes with enhancements for small store operations, enhanced offline capabilities and image management over Wi-Fi, and enhanced virtual machine management and monitoring capabilities. Simultaneously it can scale retail environments to tens of thousands of end-point devices and help modernize point-of-service rollouts.

The R programming language is experiencing a surge in popularity "in the slipstream of Python," according to this month's TIOBE index, leaping into the top ten.

"For historical context, we wrote of R's spot in TIOBE nearly two years ago, and it had just made the leap from #50 to #39," writes programming columnist Mike Melanson.

ZDNet writes: In May, when R crashed out of the top 20 for the first time in three years, Tiobe speculated that the language could be a victim of consolidation in statistical programming, with more developers in the field gravitating towards Python.
But there's been a lot of motion since then, Tech Republic reports: R rose one space to eighth place in July, but its comparison to 2019 is where the real surprise lies: It was in 20th place at the same time last year. TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen cites two reasons why R may be increasing in popularity:

- Universities and research institutes have moved away from commercial statistical languages like SAS and Stata in favor of open source languages Python and R.

- The increase in analytics being used to search for a COVID-19 vaccine....

The largest gainers in popularity between July 2019 and July 2020 are Go, which jumped from 16th to 12th place, Perl, jumping from No. 19 to No. 14, Scratch, jumping from No. 30 to No. 17, Rust, which moved from No. 33 to No. 18, and PL/SQL, which moved from No. 23 to No. 19.

Ruby fell the most, moving from 11th place to 16th, while SQL, MATLAB, and Assembly Language also slipped down the list.
ZDNet adds that "Besides R's upwards shift, Tiobe's July index doesn't show much movement in the popularity of the top languages. The top 10 in descending order are C, Java, Python, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, R, PHP and Swift."

Visual Studio magazine argues that the biggest surprise may be that the 29-year-old language classic Visual Basic is still in the top 20 — since its last stable release was 22 years ago, and by 2008 it was finally retired by Microsoft. "VB6 just refuses to go away, achieving cult-like status among a group of hard-core supporters."

For Regynald Augustin, a Black programmer at Twitter, the impetus for change arrived in an email last year with the phrase "automatic slave rekick." The words were just part of an engineering discussion about restarting a secondary process, but they prompted Augustin to start trying to change Twitter's use of words with racist connections. Augustin was used to seeing the term "slave" in technical contexts. "But with 'rekick' -- I was madder than I ever thought I'd be in the workplace," he said. From a report: First on his own and then joining forces with another engineer, Kevin Oliver, he helped spearhead an effort to replace terms like "master," "slave," "whitelist" and "blacklist" with words that didn't hearken back to oppressive parts of United States history and culture. He recounted his thoughts at the time: "This has to stop. This isn't cool. We have to change this now." No one expects that changing technical terms will end centuries of racial injustice. But some people at technology companies, including Oliver and Augustin at Twitter, are pressing for the changes that are within their reach. That includes the effort to replace racially fraught technology terms like "master" and "slave" that describe things like databases, software projects, camera flashes and hard drives. Managers at the social network formalized the two engineers' effort in January, endorsing work to address the issue systematically across the engineering division and expanding it to terms linked to discrimination on the basis of sex, age and disabilities -- replacing "man hours" and "sanity check," for example. Oliver and Augustin detailed the effort in an exclusive interview with CNET. Twitter is the latest company to make these changes. In recent weeks, scores of firms including JPMorgan GitHub, and developers of Python, Go, and Android have adopted similar measures.

JPMorgan Chase is eliminating terms like "blacklist," "master" and "slave" from its internal technology materials and code as it seeks to address racism within the company, said two sources with knowledge of the move. Reuters reports: The terms had appeared in some of the bank's technology policies, standards and control procedures, as well in the programming code that runs some of its processes, one of the sources said. The phrases "master" and "slave" code or drive are used in some programming languages and computer hardware to describe one part of a device or process that controls another. "Blacklist" is used to describe items that are automatically denied, like a list of websites forbidden by a company's cybersecurity division. "Whitelist" means the opposite - a list of items automatically approved. While JPMorgan appears to be the first in the financial sector to remove most references to these racially problematic phrases, they're not the only company to do so. GitHub, Google, and Twitter are a few others who have made similar moves recently.

"A proposal under consideration by Python's development team would finally bring pattern matching statements to the language," reports InfoWorld: The creators of the Python language are mulling a new proposal, PEP 622, that would finally bring a pattern matching statement syntax to Python. The new pattern matching statements would give Python programmers more expressive ways of handling structured data, without having to resort to workarounds...

While Python has lacked a native syntax for pattern matching, it has been possible to emulate it with if/elif/else chains or a dictionary lookup. PEP 622 proposes a method for matching an expression against a number of kinds of patterns using a match/case syntax:

match something:

case 0 | 1 | 2:
print("Small number")

case [] | [_]:
print("A short sequence")

case str() | bytes():
print("Something string-like")

case _:
print("Something else")


Supported pattern match types include literals, names, constant values, sequences, a mapping (basically, the presence of a key-value pair in the expression), a class, a mixture of the above, or any of those plus conditional expressions. Any matches that are ambiguous or impossible to resolve will throw an exception at runtime... If an object implements the __match__ method, it can be used to test if it matches a given class pattern and return an appropriate response.
One of the authors of the new PEP was Python creator Guido van Rossum, according to the article -- and he'd drafted an earlier pattern matching proposal back in 2006 that was rejected (following the rejection of an earlier proposal in 2001).

The article also notes that many aspects of this PEP were inspired by the way pattern matching works in Rust and Scala.