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Programming

Amazon Opens Its Low-Bandwidth, Long-Range Sidewalk Network To Developers (techcrunch.com) 27

An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in 2019, Amazon announced Sidewalk, its low-bandwidth, long-range wireless network that uses the 900 MHz spectrum to connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It does this by creating a mesh network between Amazon's own Echo and Ring devices and sharing a small part of their owner's bandwidth. Ideally, this means Sidewalk will be able to connect devices that sit beyond the reach of a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi signal. Until now, though, only a select number of developers were able to build applications for the network. But that's changing today. The company is now shipping software and hardware development kits, as well as an easy-to-use test kit to test the available Sidewalk connectivity in your neighborhood.

Using the new test kit, developers will be able to check their local signal strength on a map to get a better sense of whether their devices will be able to connect to the network before they start working on a product. Amazon sent me one of these Ring-branded devices to try. Getting started with it involves little more than powering it up (it does have a battery for mobile usage) and logging into Amazon's web-based Sidewalk coverage service. From there, you can quickly see all of the raw data from the GPS-enabled test kit and get access to Amazon's U.S.-wide coverage map. To ensure user privacy, the coverage maps only show coverage within a 900m-by-900m square area. You will be able to see the exact location of your own device, but not other devices that report into the coverage map.

Programming

What's New in TypeScript 5.0? (infoworld.com) 47

InfoWorld reports that TypeScript 5.0 is smaller, faster, and simpler: TypeScript 5.0, an update to Microsoft's strongly typed JavaScript variant, is now available as a production release, Microsoft announced March 16. With the upgrade, TypeScript has been rebuilt to use ECMAScript modules. TypeScript 5.0 also modernizes decorators for class customization.

ECMAScript modules reduce package size and boost performance. Decorators, an upcoming ECMAScript feature, allow for customizing classes and their members in a reusable way, Microsoft noted in a March 1 blog post. Decorators can be used on methods, properties, getters, setters, and auto-accessors. Classes can be decorated for subclassing and registration. While TypeScript previously supported experimental decorators, these were modeled on a much older version of the decorators proposal. TypeScript 5.0 will permit decorators to be placed before or after export and export default, a change made since the January 26 beta release of the new version.

Programming

Ask Slashdot: Can an Aging Project Manager Return to Coding Unpopular Legacy Codebases? 123

Anyone have career advice for this anonymous Slashdot reader? I've had a great career from 1992 to today. I've been a front line coder for most of that, but also a team lead, a supervisor, a project manager, a scrum master, etc. My career has been marked by expediency — I did whatever needed doing at the time, in whatever tools necessary.

However, now I'm 52, and I'm getting tired of leadership and project management, and I would like to return to that front line again. The legacy skills I have are no longer in demand. (They aren't Cobol.) Here's the rub: I am happy to do the work nobody else wants to do. Dead languages, abandoned codebases with little documentation, precariously built systems with rickety infrastructure... I've worked in them before, and I would be fine doing it again.

I'm afraid of nothing, but I don't want to keep climbing the bleeding edge of the technical mountain. I'd be happy to be silently, competently keeping things moving. By 55 I would like to make that move. It's either that or retire, which is an option... but I love the technical work.

They're soliciting suggestions from other Slashdot readers. ("Where to focus? How to prep?") So share your own best advice in the comments.

How can an aging project manager return to coding on unpopular legacy codebases?
Programming

'Docker is Deleting Open Source Organisations' 34

Alex Ellis: Earlier this month, Docker sent an email to any Docker Hub user who had created an "organisation", telling them their account will be deleted including all images, if they do not upgrade to a paid team plan. The email contained a link to a tersely written PDF (since, silently edited) which was missing many important details which caused significant anxiety and additional work for open source maintainers. As far as we know, this only affects organisation accounts that are often used by open source communities. There was no change to personal accounts. Free personal accounts have a a 6 month retention period. Why is this a problem?

1. Paid team plans cost 420 USD per year (paid monthly)
2. Many open source projects including ones I maintain have published images to the Docker Hub for years
3. Docker's Open Source program is hostile and out of touch

Why should you listen to me? I was one of the biggest advocates around for Docker, speaking at their events, contributing to their projects and being a loyal member of their voluntary influencer program "Docker Captains". I have written dozens if not hundreds of articles and code samples on Docker as a technology. I'm not one of those people who think that all software and services should be free. I pay for a personal account, not because I publish images there anymore, but because I need to pull images like the base image for Go, or Node.js as part of my daily open source work. When one of our OpenFaaS customers grumbled about paying for Docker Desktop, and wanted to spend several weeks trying to get Podman or Rancher Desktop working, I had to bite my tongue. If you're using a Mac or a Windows machine, it's worth paying for in my opinion. But that is a different matter. Having known Docker's new CTO personally for a very long time, I was surprised how out of touch the communication was.
More: Docker: We apologize. We did a terrible job announcing the end of Docker Free Teams..
The Almighty Buck

El Salvador President Readies Bill To Eliminate Taxes On Tech (reuters.com) 24

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele said on Thursday he will send to the country's Congress next week a bill to eliminate all taxes on technology innovations as well as computing and communications hardware manufacturing. "Next week, I'll be sending a bill to congress to eliminate all taxes (income, property, capital gains and import tariffs) on technology innovations, such as software programming, coding, apps and AI development," he said on Twitter. The tax cut would also encompass computing and communications hardware manufacturing, Bukele added. In 2021, the Salvadoran leader introduced legislation to make El Salvador the world's first sovereign nation to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. He also unveiled plans to build a "Bitcoin City" at the base of a volcano.
Television

FCC Chair Proposes Ban on Deceptive 'Broadcast TV' and 'Regional Sports' Fees (arstechnica.com) 30

A new proposal targeting hidden fees charged by cable and satellite companies could force TV providers to clearly list their "all-in" prices. From a report The proposal announced today by Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel would require cable and direct-broadcast satellite providers to "state the total cost of video programming service clearly and prominently, including broadcast retransmission consent, regional sports programming, and other programming-related fees, as a prominent single line item on subscribers' bills and in promotional materials." TV providers generally advertise a low rate that doesn't include charges such as the "Broadcast TV" and "Regional Sports Network" fees. Cable and satellite companies say these fees cover the amounts they have to pay for programming. But paying for programming is part of the cost of doing businessâ"there would be no TV channel lineup without channels, after all. By treating programming costs as separate fees, TV providers advertise rates that aren't even close to what customers actually have to pay. Comcast, for example, adds nearly $40 to monthly TV bills in the form of Broadcast TV and Regional Sports Network fees.
AI

Microsoft's GitHub To Add OpenAI Chat Functions To Coding Tool (bloomberg.com) 5

Microsoft's GitHub unit created one of the first widely deployed programs using OpenAI's language-generation tools -- an app called Copilot that helped software developers write computer code. Now GitHub is adding a chat and voice feature that will let programmers ask how to accomplish certain coding tasks. From a report: The new version announced Wednesday is called Copilot X, which GitHub Chief Executive Officer Thomas Dohmke said he demonstrated to one of his children by asking it how to program a snake game in Python. The chat window can provide explanations of what segments of code are meant to do, create ways to test the code and propose fixes for bugs. Developers can also give instructions or ask questions using their voice.

GitHub first previewed Copilot in 2021 and widely released it last year. The initial product contained a completion tool that suggested snippets of programming code as a software developer typed. It attracted hundreds of thousands of developers by November and its product name had become short-hand for Microsoft's strategy to deploy these kinds of assistive technologies to a wide array of its products, from Office software to security programs. Now that OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot has made a splash in popular culture, companies are trying to follow Microsoft in embedding the research lab's tools into products and business strategies. At the same time, rivals such as Alphabet's Google are releasing chatbot competitors.

Java

Oracle Aims To Sustain Java's 27-Year Franchise With v20 Rollout (siliconangle.com) 80

Oracle today announced the availability of Java 20, the latest version of the popular programming language and development platform. From a report: The latest version of the 27-year-old language includes thousands of performance, stability and security improvements and features seven enhancement proposals to the Java Development Kit that are aimed at increasing developer productivity and enhancing performance, stability and security. Oracle has coordinated a disciplined rollout of new Java releases on a six-month cadence for the past five years and says it's the top contributor to the open-source project. Java is the world's third most widely used programming language, according to Tiobe Software BV, and is No. 1 in organizational development, according to Oracle. "The innovation pipeline has never been richer," said Chad Arimura, vice president of developer relations at Oracle. "The problem space is changing and developers have higher demands on their programming languages than ever."
Desktops (Apple)

Unix Pioneer Ken Thompson Announces He's Switching From Mac To Linux (youtube.com) 175

The closing keynote at the SCaLE 20x conference was delivered by 80-year-old Ken Thompson (co-creator of Unix, Plan9, UTF8, and the Go programming language).

Slashdot reader motang shared Thompson's answer to a question at the end about what operating system he uses today: I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple.

Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious. But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay.

And I have come, within the last month or two, to say, even though I've invested, you know, a zillion years in Apple — I'm throwing it away. And I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian in particular.

Python

'Codon' Compiles Python to Native Machine Code That's Even Faster Than C (mit.edu) 124

Codon is a new "high-performance Python compiler that compiles Python code to native machine code without any runtime overhead," according to its README file on GitHub. Typical speedups over Python are on the order of 10-100x or more, on a single thread. Codon's performance is typically on par with (and sometimes better than) that of C/C++. Unlike Python, Codon supports native multithreading, which can lead to speedups many times higher still.
Its development team includes researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab, according to this announcement from MIT shared by long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R): The compiler lets developers create new domain-specific languages (DSLs) within Python — which is typically orders of magnitude slower than languages like C or C++ — while still getting the performance benefits of those other languages. "We realized that people don't necessarily want to learn a new language, or a new tool, especially those who are nontechnical. So we thought, let's take Python syntax, semantics, and libraries and incorporate them into a new system built from the ground up," says Ariya Shajii SM '18, PhD '21, lead author on a new paper about the team's new system, Codon. "The user simply writes Python like they're used to, without having to worry about data types or performance, which we handle automatically — and the result is that their code runs 10 to 100 times faster than regular Python. Codon is already being used commercially in fields like quantitative finance, bioinformatics, and deep learning."

The team put Codon through some rigorous testing, and it punched above its weight. Specifically, they took roughly 10 commonly used genomics applications written in Python and compiled them using Codon, and achieved five to 10 times speedups over the original hand-optimized implementations.... The Codon platform also has a parallel backend that lets users write Python code that can be explicitly compiled for GPUs or multiple cores, tasks which have traditionally required low-level programming expertise.... Part of the innovation with Codon is that the tool does type checking before running the program. That lets the compiler convert the code to native machine code, which avoids all of the overhead that Python has in dealing with data types at runtime.

"Python is the language of choice for domain experts that are not programming experts. If they write a program that gets popular, and many people start using it and run larger and larger datasets, then the lack of performance of Python becomes a critical barrier to success," says Saman Amarasinghe, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL principal investigator. "Instead of needing to rewrite the program using a C-implemented library like NumPy or totally rewrite in a language like C, Codon can use the same Python implementation and give the same performance you'll get by rewriting in C. Thus, I believe Codon is the easiest path forward for successful Python applications that have hit a limit due to lack of performance."

The other piece of the puzzle is the optimizations in the compiler. Working with the genomics plugin, for example, will perform its own set of optimizations that are specific to that computing domain, which involves working with genomic sequences and other biological data, for example. The result is an executable file that runs at the speed of C or C++, or even faster once domain-specific optimizations are applied.

Programming

Programming Pioneer Grady Booch on Functional Programming, Web3, and Conscious Machines (infoworld.com) 76

InfoWorld interviews Grady Booch, chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research (who is also a pioneer in design patterns, agile methods, and one of the creators of UML).

Here's some of the highlights: Q: Let me begin by asking something "of the moment." There has been an almost cultural war between object-oriented programming and functional programming. What is your take on this?

Booch: I had the opportunity to conduct an oral history with John Backus — one of the pioneers of functional programming — in 2006 on behalf of the Computer History Museum. I asked John why functional programming didn't enter the mainstream, and his answer was perfect: "Functional programming makes it easy to do hard things" he said, "but functional programming makes it very difficult to do easy things...."


Q: Would you talk a bit about cryptography and Web3?

Booch: Web3 is a flaming pile of feces orbiting a giant dripping hairball. Cryptocurrencies — ones not backed by the full faith and credit of stable nation states — have only a few meaningful use cases, particularly if you are a corrupt dictator of a nation with a broken economic system, or a fraud and scammer who wants to grow their wealth at the expense of greater fools. I was one of the original signatories of a letter to Congress in 2022 for a very good reason: these technologies are inherently dangerous, they are architecturally flawed, and they introduce an attack surface that threatens economies....


Q: What do you make of transhumanism?

Booch: It's a nice word that has little utility for me other than as something people use to sell books and to write clickbait articles....


Q: Do you think we'll ever see conscious machines? Or, perhaps, something that compels us to accept them as such?

Booch: My experience tells me that the mind is computable. Hence, yes, I have reason to believe that we will see synthetic minds. But not in my lifetime; or yours; or your children; or your children's children. Remember, also, that this will likely happen incrementally, not with a bang, and as such, we will co-evolve with these new species.

Programming

Something Pretty Right: a History of Visual Basic (retool.com) 124

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic, Retool's Ryan Lucas has a nice round-up of how Visual Basic became the world's most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.

Visual Basic (or VB) burst onto the scene at a magical, transitional moment, presenting a radically simpler alternative for Windows 3.0 development. Bill Gates' genuine enthusiasm for VB is evident in an accompanying 1991 video in which BillG personally and playfully demonstrates Visual Basic 1.0 at its launch event, as well as in a 1994 video in which Gates thanks Alan Cooper, the "Father of Visual Basic," with the Windows Pioneer Award.

For Gates, VB was love at first sight. "It blew his mind, he had never seen anything like it," recalls Cooper of Gates's reaction to his 1988 demo of a prototype. "At one point he turned to his retinue and asked 'Why can't we do stuff like this?'" Gates even came up with the idea of taking Cooper's visual programming frontend and replacing its small custom internal language with BASIC.

After seeing what Microsoft had done to his baby, Cooper reportedly sat frustrated in the front row at the launch event. But it's hard to argue with success, and Cooper eventually came to appreciate VB's impact. "Had Ruby [Cooper's creation] gone to the market as a shell construction set," Cooper said, "it would have made millions of people happier, but then Visual Basic made hundreds of millions of people happier. I was not right, or rather, I was right enough, had a modicum of rightness. Same for Bill Gates, but the two of us together did something pretty right."

At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide. Many of the innovations that Alan Cooper and Scott Ferguson's teams introduced 30 years ago with VB are nowhere to be found in modern development, fueling a nostalgic fondness for the ease and magic VB delivered that we have yet to rekindle.

Programming

GitHub Starts Mandatory 2FA Rollout Early for Some Users (github.blog) 171

By the end of 2023, GitHub will require all code contributors to enable two-factor authentication — part of "a platform-wide effort to secure software development by improving account security."

But on Monday they'll start rolling it out, according to a new blog post, reaching out to "smaller" groups of developers and administrators "to notify them of their 2FA enrollment requirement." If your account is selected for enrollment, you will be notified via email and see a banner on GitHub.com, asking you to enroll. You'll have 45 days to configure 2FA on your account — before that date nothing will change about using GitHub except for the reminders. We'll let you know when your enablement deadline is getting close, and once it has passed you will be required to enable 2FA the first time you access GitHub.com.

You'll have the ability to snooze this notification for up to a week, but after that your ability to access your account will be limited. Don't worry: this snooze period only starts once you've signed in after the deadline, so if you're on vacation or out of office, you'll still get that one week period to set up 2FA when you're back at your desk....

Twenty-eight (28) days after you enable 2FA, you'll be asked to perform a 2FA check-up while using GitHub.com, which validates that your 2FA setup is working correctly. Previously signed-in users will be able to reconfigure 2FA if they have misconfigured or misplaced second factors during onboarding.

GitHub's blog post says their gradual rollout plan "will let us make sure developers are able to successfully onboard, and make adjustments as needed before we scale to larger groups as the year progresses." InfoWorld summarizes the options: Users can choose between 2FA methods such as TOTP (Time-based One-Time Password), SMS (Short Message Service), security keys, or GitHub Mobile as a preferred 2FA method. GitHub advises using security keys and TOTPs wherever possible; SMS does not provide the same level of protection and is no longer recommended under NIST 800-63B, the company said.
Internally GitHub is also testing passkeys, according to their blog post. "Protecting developers and consumers of the open source ecosystem from these types of attacks is the first and most critical step toward securing the supply chain."
Open Source

Stack Overflow Survey Finds Most-Proven Technologies: Open Source, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning (stackoverflow.blog) 70

Stack Overflow explored the "hype cycle" by asking thousands of real developers whether nascent tech trends have really proven themselves, and how they feel about them. "With AI-assisted technologies in the news, this survey's aim was to get a baseline for perceived utility and impact" of various technologies, writes Stack Overflow's senior analyst for market research and insights.

The results? "Open source is clearly positioned as the north star to all other technologies, lighting the way to the chosen land of future technology prosperity." Technologies such as blockchain or AI may dominate tech media headlines, but are they truly trusted in the eyes of developers and technologists? On a scale of zero (Experimental) to 10 (Proven), the top proven technologies by mean score are open source with 6.9, cloud computing with 6.5, and machine learning with 5.9. The lowest scoring were quantum computing with 3.7, nanotechnology with 4.5, and low code/no code with 4.6....

[When asked for the next technology that everyone will use], AI comes in at the top of the list by a large margin, but our three top proven selections (open source, machine learning, cloud computing) follow after....

It's one thing to believe a technology has a prosperous future, it's another to believe a technology deserves a prosperous future. Alongside the emergent sentiment, respondents also scored the same technologies on a zero (Negative Impact) to 10 (Positive Impact) scale for impact on the world. The top positive mean scoring technologies were open source with 7.2, sustainable technologies with 6.6 and machine learning with 6.5; the top negative mean scoring technologies were low code/no code, InnerSource, and blockchain all with 5.3. Seeing low code/no code and blockchain score so low here makes sense because both could be associated with questionable job security in certain developer careers; however it's surprising that AI is not there with them on the negative end of the spectrum. AI-assisted technology had an above average mean score for positive impact (6.2) and the percent positive score is not that far off from those machine learning and cloud computing (28% vs. 33% or 32%).

Possibly what we are seeing here as far as why developers would not rate AI more negatively than technologies like low code/no code or blockchain but do give it a higher emergent score is that they understand the technology better than a typical journalist or think tank analyst. AI-assisted tech is the second highest chosen technology on the list for wanting more hands-on training among respondents, just below machine learning. Developers understand the distinction between media buzz around AI replacing humans in well-paying jobs and the possibility of humans in better quality jobs when AI and machine learning technologies mature. Low code/no code for the same reason probably doesn't deserve to be rated so low, but it's clear that developers are not interested in learning more about it.

Open source software is the overall choice for most positive and most proven scores in sentiment compared to the set of technologies we polled our users about.

One quadrant of their graph shows three proven technologies which developers still had negative feelings about: biometrics, serverless computing, and rapid prototyping tools. (With "Internet of Things" straddling the line between positive and negative feelings.)

And there were two technologies which 10% of respondents thought would never be widely used in the future: low code/no code and blockchain. "Post-FTX scandal, it's clear that most developers do not feel blockchain is positive or proven," the analyst writes.

"However there is still desire to learn as more respondents want training with blockchain than cloud computing. There's a reason to believe in the direct positive impact of a given technology when it pays the bills."
Programming

Go Finally Returns to Top 10 of Programming Language Popularity List (infoworld.com) 74

"Google's Go language has re-entered the top 10 of the Tiobe index of programming language popularity, after a nearly six-year absence," reports InfoWorld: Go ranks 10th in the March edition of the index, after placing 11th the previous month. The language last appeared in the top 10 in July 2017.

The re-emergence of Go in the March 2023 index is being attributed to its popularity with software engineers and its strength in combining the right features, namely built-in concurrency, garbage collection, static typing, and good performance. Google's backing also helps, improving long-term trust in the language, Tiobe said.

The languages Go beat out include "assembly language" at #11, followed by MATLAB, Delphi/Object Pascal, Scratch, and Classic Visual Basic.

Here's the complete top-ten most popular programming languages, according to TIOBE:
  • Python
  • C
  • Java
  • C++
  • C#
  • Visual Basic
  • JavaScript
  • SQL
  • PHP
  • Go

Programming

Meet Zig: the Modern Alternative to the C Programming Language (infoworld.com) 117

Systems-oriented developers already have programming languages like C, C++, Rust, and Go, notes InfoWorld.

But now, "we also have Zig, a newer language that seeks to absorb what's best about these languages and offer comparable performance with a better, more reliable developer experience." Zig is a very active project. It was started by Andrew Kelley in 2015 and now seems to be reaching critical mass. Zig's ambition is rather momentous in software history: to become the heir to C's longstanding reign as both the go-to portable low-level language and as a standard to which other languages are compared....

Currently, Zig is being used to implement the Bun.js JavaScript runtime as an alternative to Node.js. Bun's creator Jarred Sumner told me "Zig is sort of similar to writing C, but with better memory safety features in debug mode and modern features like defer (sort of similar to Go's) and arbitrary code can be executed at compile-time via comptime. It has very few keywords so it's a lot easier to learn than C++ or Rust."

Zig differs from most other languages in its small feature footprint, which is the outcome of an explicit design goal: Only one obvious way to do things. Zig's developers take this goal so much to heart that for a time, Zig had no for loop, which was deemed an unnecessary syntactic elaboration upon the already adequate while loop. Kevin Lynagh, coming from a Rust background, wrote, "The language is so small and consistent that after a few hours of study I was able to load enough of it into my head to just do my work." Nathan Craddock, a C developer, echoed the sentiment. Programmers seem to really like the focused quality of Zig's syntax.

While Zig is "approaching" production-ready status, the article notes its high degree of interoperability with C and C++, its unique error-handling system, and its elimination of a malloc keyword (leaving memory allocation to the standard library).

"For now, the Zig team appears to be taking its time with the 1.0 release, which may drop in 2025 or later — but none of that stops us from building all sorts of things with the language today."
Microsoft

Microsoft's Latest AI Assistant Is Meant for Marketers, Customer Reps and Work Apps (bloomberg.com) 23

Microsoft, having brought artificial intelligence to its battle with Google over search, is now turning to the latest AI technology to catch up with rivals in the corporate applications market such as Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. From a report: The software giant is introducing an AI assistant -- called Dynamics 365 Copilot -- for applications that handle tasks such as sales, marketing and customer service. Based on technology from OpenAI, the software can draft contextual chat and email answers to customer-service queries. It can help marketers come up with customer categories to target, and write product listings for e-commerce. The new capabilities are being released in preview form on Monday and are being tested by hundreds of early customers. For example, Italian aperitif maker Campari is trying out the marketing tools to concoct targeted campaigns for events around the Negroni cocktail.

Microsoft also said its next set of AI announcements, planned for March 16, will relate to "workplace productivity," a term the software maker usually uses to mean Office software. Business applications are the latest Microsoft programs to get an AI makeover so far this year as the company adds language-generation tools and chatbots to everything from its Bing internet-search engine to the Teams corporate-conferencing software. The strategy follows a successful debut for an AI programming tool called GitHub Copilot last year and Microsoft's expansion of its investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in January. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has said the company plans to overhaul its whole product lineup using AI and tools from OpenAI. In the business applications category, where Microsoft has operated for more than two decades but lagged behind rivals, Nadella ultimately wants to use AI to break down silos between formerly separate programs, each with their own workflows and acronyms, like ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) software. Instead, he said, they should be blended and have one AI copilot that can retrieve information and help workers with tasks. Still, like the Bing bot, Nadella noted Microsoft's Dynamics tool will also make mistakes.

Programming

C++ 23 Language Standard Declared Feature-Complete (infoworld.com) 61

An anonymous reader shares this report from InfoWorld: C++ 23, a planned upgrade to the popular programming language, is now feature-complete, with capabilities such as standard library module support. On the horizon is a subsequent release, dubbed C++ 26.

The ISO C++ Committee in early February completed technical work on the C++ 23 specification and is producing a final document for a draft approval ballot, said Herb Sutter, chair of the committee, in a blog post on February 13. The standard library module is expected to improve compilation.

Other features slated for C++ 23 include simplifying implicit move, fixing temporaries in range-for loops, multidimensional and static operator[], and Unicode improvements. Also featured is static constexpr in constexpr functions. The full list of features can be found at cppreference.com.

Many features of C++ 23 already have been implemented in major compilers and libraries, Sutter said. A planned C++ 26 release of the language, meanwhile, is slated to emphasize concurrency and parallelism.

Businesses

Zoom Fires Its President After Only 10 Months (businessinsider.com) 20

Zoom has sacked its president, Greg Tomb, a former Google employee who only began working at the company around 10 months ago. Insider reports: Zoom said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Tomb's termination was effective as of Friday. He will receive severance benefits in line with his employment arrangements, which are payable upon a "termination without cause," according to the SEC filing. The filing was signed off by Aparna Bawa, the chief operating officer at Zoom.

It is unclear who will take over Tomb's position as president of Zoom. A spokesperson from Zoom told Insider the company won't find a replacement for Tomb and declined to comment further. Tomb's LinkedIn profile shows that he joined Zoom as president in June 2022. Before this, he worked at Google for more than a year as the vice president of sales for Google Workspace, Security, and Geo Enterprise. Tomb was also previously a president at software firm SAP and computer programming provider Vivido Labs, according to LinkedIn. He is a member of the board of Pure Storage, a tech company, his LinkedIn profile said.

Intel

Intel Releases Software Platform for Quantum Computing Developers (reuters.com) 17

Intel on Tuesday released a software platform for developers to build quantum algorithms that can eventually run on a quantum computer that the chip giant is trying to build. From a report: The platform, called Intel Quantum SDK, would for now allow those algorithms to run on a simulated quantum computing system, said Anne Matsuura, Intel Labs' head of quantum applications and architecture. Matsuura said developers can use the long-established programming language C++ to build quantum algorithms, making it more accessible for people without quantum computing expertise. "The Intel Quantum SDK helps programmers get ready for future large-scale commercial quantum computers," Matsuura said in a statement. "It will also advance the industry by creating a community of developers that will accelerate the development of applications."

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