The recently updated website for President Joe Biden's White House carried an invitation for tech specialists savvy enough to find it. From a report: Hidden in the HTML code on www.whitehouse.gov was an invitation to join the U.S. Digital Service, a technology unit within the White House. "If you're reading this, we need your help building back better," the message said. Former President Barack Obama launched the service in 2014 to recruit technologists to help revamp government services -- for example by modernizing Medicare's payment system or reforming hiring practices across government agencies. Tech specialists join the Digital Service for typically one or two years.

TechRepublic shares a remarkable calculation by the not-for-profit IT leadership group the Consortium for Information and Software Security: CISQ's 2020 report, The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the U.S., looked at the financial impact of software projects that went awry or otherwise ended up leaving companies with a larger bill by creating additional headaches for them. According to the consortium, unsuccessful IT projects alone cost U.S. companies $260 billion in 2020, while software problems in legacy systems cost businesses $520 billion and software failures in operational systems left a dent of $1.56 trillion in corporate coffers.

As a result, the total cost of poor software quality in the U.S. amounted to approximately $2.08 trillion in 2020, CISQ said. Comparing this to the total U.S. IT and software wage base of $1.4 trillion, the company said the figures "underscored the magnitude of the negative economic impact of poor software quality."

AmiMoJo shares a report from 9to5Mac: When Apple revived MagSafe with the iPhone 12 lineup, one question brought up was how these latest devices with more magnets would interact with medical devices like pacemakers. Apple's official word was that iPhone 12/MagSafe wouldn't interfere more than previous iPhones. Now one of the first medical studies has been published by the Heart Rhythm Journal that saw a Medtronic pacemaker deactivated by holding an iPhone 12 near it (via MacMagazine. It doesn't sound like there is concrete evidence that iPhone 12 and MagSafe do pose a greater risk of increased interference but with this study out now, we may see more testing in the medical field to find out for sure. Of course it's not just iPhones or smartphones that can create interference issues, it can be any item that contains magnets strong enough create a problem.

As you'd expect, the short-term solution is to keep iPhones and other devices away from pacemakers and other similar medical devices. However, reported by Medical Xpress, Medtronic and others are likely looking to shift away from the reliance on magnets in future devices: "Unless companies like Medtronic get on board and move to smarter device configuration options, they will continue to butt heads with consumer devices -- and they will continue to lose. Smarter options don't have to be expensive; just look at your cheap IR TV remote or ultrasonic receiver-emitter pair. These devices simply work. They use an uncomplicated code to make sure there is no interference from all the other ambient sources that are invariably present. A couple of secure ultrasonic bits superimposed on your basic 40 khz carrier waves is all that is really needed. It is likely that companies like Medtronic are working on solutions like this; for example, a Medtronic programming head of some sort can be had on Ebay at the moment for a mere $34.99."

Programming columnist Mike Melanson describes the announcement of this year's programming language of the year: The TIOBE Index, the somewhat dubious ranking of programming language popularity according to search engine results, has announced its yearly proclamation of "language of the year," with the award going to Python for the fourth time in its history [more than any other programming language].

The title, the project leads write, "is awarded to the programming language that has gained most popularity in one year," with Python moving up 2.01% in 2020, which they attribute to "the ease of learning the language and its high productivity," alongside its numerous use cases.
C++ "is a very close runner up" for programming language of the year, TIOBE tells us, "with an increase of 1.99%. Other winners are C (+1.66%), Groovy (+1.23%) and R (+1.10%)...

"What else happened in the TIOBE index in 2020? C has become number 1 again, beating Java. Java lost almost 5% in only 1 year."

The WebAssembly portable binary format will now have wider support from Wasmer, the server-side runtime which "allows universal binaries compiled from C++, Rust, Go, Python, and other languages to run on different operating systems and in web browsers without modification," reports InfoWorld: Wasmer can run lightweight containers based on WebAssembly on a variety of platforms — Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android, iOS — from the desktop to the cloud to IoT and mobile devices, while also allowing these containers to be embedded in any programming language. The Wasmer runtime also is able to run the Nginx web server and other WebAssembly modules...

Wasmer was introduced in December 2018, with the stated goal of doing for WebAssembly what JavaScript did for Node.js: establish it server-side. By leveraging Wasmer for containerization, developers can create universal binaries that work anywhere without modification, including on Linux, MacOS, and Windows as well as web browsers. WebAssembly automatically sandboxes applications by default for secure execution, shielding the host environment from malicious code, bugs, and vulnerabilities in the software being run.
Wasmer 1.0 reached "general availability status" with its release on January 5, and its developers are now claiming "out of this world" runtime and compiler performance.

"We believe that WebAssembly will be a crucial component for the future of software execution and containerization (not only inside the browser but also outside)."

phalse phace writes: After days of advanced talks to sell Quibi's content library to Roku, the companies have finally reached a deal. According to Deadline, Roku will acquire most of Quibi's content for less than $100 million.

"The acquisition covers most of the Quibi library, but some daily news shows are not part of the package," reports Deadline. "A key draw for Roku is the talent, a roster including Idris Elba, Kevin Hart, Liam Hemsworth, Anna Kendrick, Nicole Richie, Chrissy Teigen and Lena Waithe. The lineup includes titles like Most Dangerous Game, Dummy and Murder House Flip. The programming will be available for free starting later this year. Shows will have advertising, as they did on the $5-a-month Quibi service, and they will be housed on the Roku Channel." Earlier today, Roku says it sold more smart TVs in the U.S. in 2020 than competitors like Samsung, LG and Vizio, becoming the biggest smart TV platform in North America.

According to The Wall Street Journal, failed mobile-first streaming service Quibi is in advanced talks to sell the rights to its content library to Roku for an undisclosed price. The Verge reports: If it were to happen, the deal could give the Roku Channel exclusive access to Quibi's slate of programming. None of Quibi's shows ever really took off, but Roku may feel that the content would stand a better chance when available on the best-selling streaming devices in the US.

Quibi announced it was shutting down back in October, just six months after its much-hyped launch. The service was headed by former HP CEO Meg Whitman and former Disney chairman and movie producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, who managed to raise almost $2 billion in funding before the app was released. Katzenberg had already tried to get companies including Facebook and NBCUniversal to pick up Quibi programming ahead of its demise, according to The Information.

Supply issues have hamstrung the rollout of the latest generation of video game consoles. Even now, nearly two months after the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S released, Microsoft is still scrambling to meet demand and has reportedly reached out to chipmaker AMD to fast-track production on its end. From a report: AMD manufactures the GPU and CPU for both consoles, so if it's able to push out its chips faster, Microsoft could, in theory, churn out more consoles by extension. As spotted by VGC, Microsoft is "working as hard as we can" to pump out more systems and has even contacted AMD for help, according to Xbox head Phil Spencer in a recent appearance on the Major Nelson Radio podcast hosted by Xbox Live director of programming Larry Hyrb "I get some people [asking], 'why didn't you build more? Why didn't you start earlier? Why didn't you ship them earlier?' I mean, all of those things," Spencer said. "It's really just down to physics and engineering. We're not holding them back: We're building them as fast as we can. We have all the assembly lines going. I was on the phone last week with [CEO and president] Lisa Su at AMD [asking], 'How do we get more? How do we get more?' So it's something that we're constantly working on."

"When you do computer programming, what sort of mental work are you doing?" asks science/tech journalist Clive Thompson: For a long time, folks have speculated on this. Since coding involves pondering hierarchies of symbols, maybe the mental work is kinda like writing or reading? Others have speculated it's more similar to the way our brains process math and puzzles. A group of MIT neuroscientists recently did fMRI brain-scans of young adults while they were solving a small coding challenge using a textual programming language (Python) and a visual one (Scratch Jr.). The results?

The brain activity wasn't similar to when we process language. Instead, coding seems to activate the "multiple demand network," which — as the scientists note in a public-relations writeup of their work — "is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles."

So, coding is more like doing math than processing language?

Sorrrrrrt of ... but not exactly so. The scientists saw activity patterns that differ from those you'd see during math, too.

The upshot: Coding — in this (very preliminary!) work, anyway — looks to be a little different from either language or math. As the note, in a media release...

"Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing...."

Just anecdotally — having interviewed hundreds of coders and computer scientists for my book CODERS — I've met amazing programmers and computer scientists with all manner of intellectual makeups. There were math-heads, and there were people who practically counted on their fingers. There were programmers obsessed with — and eloquent in — language, and ones gently baffled by written and spoken communication. Lots of musicians, lots of folks who slid in via a love of art and visual design, then whose brains just seized excitedly on the mouthfeel of algorithms.

Long-time programmer/researcher/former MIT research fellow Jonathan Edwards writes a blog called "Alarming Development: Dispatches from the User Liberation Front."

He began the new year by arguing that software "is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996." Slashdot reader tonique summarizes Edwards' argument: In 1996 there were "LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, Oracle, Smalltalk, Windows, C++, LabView, HyperCard, Mathematica, Haskell, WWW, Python, Mosaic, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Flash, Postgress [sic]". After that we're supposed to have achieved "IntelliJ, Eclipse, ASP, Spring, Rails, Scala, AWS, Clojure, Heroku, V8, Go, React, Docker, Kubernetes, Wasm".

Edwards's main thesis is that the Internet boom around 1996 caused this slowdown because programmers could get rich quick. Then smart and ambitious people moved into Silicon Valley, and founded startups. But you can't do research at a startup due to time and money constraints. Today only "megacorps" like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are supposedly able to do relevant research because of their vast resources.

Computer science wouldn't help, either, because "most of our software technology was built in companies" and because computer science "strongly disincentivizes risky long-range research". Further, according to Edwards, the aversion to risk and "hyper-professionalization of Computer Science" is part of a larger and worrisome trend throughout the whole field and all of western civilisation.
Edwards' blog post argues that since 1996 "almost everything has been cleverly repackaging and re-engineering prior inventions. Or adding leaky layers to partially paper over problems below. Nothing is obsoleted, and the teetering stack grows ever higher..."

"[M]aybe I'm imagining things. Maybe the reason progress stopped in 1996 is that we invented everything. Maybe there are no more radical breakthroughs possible, and all that's left is to tinker around the edges. This is as good as it gets: a 50 year old OS, 30 year old text editors, and 25 year old languages.

"Bullshit. No technology has ever been permanent. We've just lost the will to improve."

Today a staff writer at Salon argues "The Mandalorian" has redeemed the Star Wars universe: The Disney+ series "The Mandalorian" has been both a critical triumph and commercial success. In my judgment, it's the most compelling live-action story in the "Star Wars" universe since 1983's "Return of The Jedi".

To that end, the story in "The Mandalorian's" first two seasons about a mysterious bounty hunter and "the child" (who is actually more than 50 years old) he's entrusted with as they navigate their way through a dangerous world — rife with "scum and villainy," where the remnants of the evil Empire still terrorize the galaxy — has accomplished something difficult in science fiction and other genre entertainment. Longtime and serious "Star Wars" aficionados are enthusiastic about "The Mandalorian's" attention to detail and obvious love and respect for George Lucas's "Star Wars" universe. More casual "Star Wars" fans can enjoy the series for its story of family, friendship and adventure, and of course for "baby Yoda," aka Grogu, "the Child," a character described by legendary film director Werner Herzog as "heartbreakingly beautiful...."

Where does "The Mandalorian" go next? Why is it such a compelling TV series and story? Is there such a thing as too much "fan service" in a genre film or TV series? Why has "The Mandalorian" been such a success, compared to the most recent "Star Wars" films? Disney and Lucasfilm have recently announced plans for 11 new TV series and at least three more feature films. At what point does "Star Wars" become overexposed and made into something common, a parody of itself?

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Bill Slavicsek, one of the writers and developers of the much-beloved "Star Wars" roleplaying game from West End Games. He is also the author of the "Star Wars Sourcebook," "A Guide to the Star Wars Universe," many guides to RPGs and, more recently, "Defining a Galaxy: 30 Years in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...." He was one of the main game designers for the Dungeons and Dragons RPGs and is currently the lead writer for the massively multi-player RPG Elder Scrolls Online. Fair warning: This conversation contains spoilers for Season Two of "The Mandalorian," which is now available on the Disney+ streaming service.
Meanwhile CinemaBlend shares some commentary from another source, writing that "We need more Star Wars discourse like this." No arguing about bloodlines, or one director undoing the plotlines laid down by another. Just all of us, being amused by a cat who delightfully thinks that he or she can catch the lightsaber that a brooding Kylo Ren is tossing away during a pivotal moment in J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker... And it even has Mark Hamill's seal of approval...

Kitty cats aside, it's a very good time to be a Star Wars fan. The Mandalorian just wrapped up an incredible season of television on Disney+ and Kathleen Kennedy recently ushered in a wave of new programming that will keep Star Wars on our radars for years to come.

Basecamp's David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Ruby on Rails) announced on Twitter this week that "all the tricks and tooling we used to build the front-end for Hey.com" have now been released as Hotwire (also known as New Magic), "an alternative approach to building modern web applications without using much JavaScript by sending HTML instead of JSON over the wire." This includes our brand-new Turbo framework...a set of complimentary techniques for speeding up page changes and form submissions, dividing complex pages into components, and stream partial page updates over WebSocket. All without writing any JavaScript at all...
Hotwire's web page argues HTML over the wire "makes for fast first-load pages, keeps template rendering on the server, and allows for a simpler, more productive development experience in any programming language, without sacrificing any of the speed or responsiveness associated with a traditional single-page application." On Twitter, Hansson called it "a refinement of years of research, experimentation, and SHIPPING HTML AT THE CENTER. It's been a revelation for us. Both for the web, and for our native apps." He shared a 13-minute video demonstration — then added a thoughtful comment about the state of web development today.

"Really curious to continue pushing the ECMAScript 6 + ES Modules approach in the browser. This isn't strictly related to Hotwire, but it's part of deconstructing the overly complicated mess we've all made of frontend development. One brick at the time!"

Leaked Nintendo documents have revealed a frightening surveillance operation carried out against a hacker who was researching exploits for the 3DS handheld. TorrentFreak reports: During the past 24 hours, various Twitter accounts (1,2) have been posting snippets from documents that were recently leaked from Nintendo. While there are numerous items of interest, the most shocking revelations involve Neimod, a hacker who several years ago developed exploits for the 3DS handheld console. [T]he scale of the operation, which is revealed in detail in the leaked documents, shows just how far the gaming giant was prepared to go to stop his work. For example, the leak reveals personal profiling that dug deeply into Neimod's education status, listed details of his working life, while offering evidence of physical snooping on his daily lifestyle. What time he could be found at home, who came to see him there, and even when he visited places like banks and restaurants are all included. While this kind of surveillance is creepy in its own right, additional documents reveal a detailed plan to use the gathered intelligence to physically confront Neimod in order to pressurize him into complying with the company's demands.

According to Nintendo's planning, the operation would begin around April 15, 2013, with its team meeting at a local hotel to discuss and finalize their plans. Following a review of Neimod's movements of the previous week, the team would then decide where and when contact would be made -- after work or at home, for example. With an undercover investigator monitoring Neimod to discover what time he left work, Neimod was to be approached by a 'contact team,' who were instructed to approach their target "in a friendly, non-threatening, professional, and courteous manner." "Provide a business card," the instructions read. After Neimod had been engaged in conversation, the team was instructed to flatter the hacker by "acknowledging his engineering/programming aptitude." They were also told to reference his stated aim of not "facilitating piracy" with his hacks but point out Nintendo's concerns that a release of his hack could do just that.

Whether Neimod complied or resisted, Nintendo prepared for both eventualities. The following slide, posted to Twitter by Eclipse-TT, shows a flow chart that begins with instructions for the "Knock and Talk Team," details a staging area, rules of engagement, and plans for what should happen when things go to plan -- or otherwise. The Nintendo "Final Enforcement Proposal" document describes a "carrot and stick" approach, with the stick being a laundry list of potential offenses committed by Neimod under Belgian law and the carrot representing a number of sweeteners that might be of interest to the hacker. If cooperation was achieved, Nintendo suggested it could refrain from filing a criminal complaint. It may also enter into a "bounty" contract with Neimod with payments made for finding and documenting exploits. Within certain parameters, his discoveries could still be announced to the public, allowing him to retain "bragging rights." This could help Nintendo's image, the company wrote.

Application-security company Veracode "has released the 11th volume of its annual State of Software Security report, and its findings reveal that flawed applications are the norm, open-source libraries are increasingly untrustworthy, and it's taking a long time to patch problems," reports TechRepublic.

The top three security flaws — like last year — are still information leakage, cryptographic issues, and CRLF injection: The report found a full 76% of apps contained flaws, and 24% of apps have flaws considered highly severe. Some 70% of apps are inheriting security flaws from their open-source libraries, but it's important to note that only 30% of apps have more security bugs in their open-source libraries than in code written in-house, suggesting that it isn't solely open-source projects that are to blame... In terms of how bugs are being resolved, Veracode found that 73% of the bugs it found as part of the report were patched, which is a big improvement over previous years, when that number was in the mid-50% range. Despite that good sign, it's still taking an average of six months to close half of discovered flaws...

Veracode also released a heatmap of the worst bugs in the most popular languages. Interestingly enough, the language with the least use of open-source libraries is also the one with the most bugs: PHP.

Looking at the heatmap, it's easy to spot which of the five popular languages included has the worst security. Following PHP is C++, then Java, .Net, JavaScript, and Python. The latter two are, doing considerably better than the competition, with the worst flaws in each only being found in roughly 30% of apps. Compared to PHP with 74.6% of its apps vulnerable to cross-site scripting, JavaScript and Python are security powerhouses.

CNET reports: With the next version of Chrome, Google is moving ahead with a plan to improve privacy and security by reining in some abilities of extensions used to customize the browser. The move had angered some developers who expected earlier it would cripple ad blockers. Manifest v3, the programming interface behind Google's security plans, will arrive with Chrome 88 in mid-January, Google said Wednesday at the Chrome Dev Summit. Extensions using the earlier Manifest v2 will still work for at least a year...

Among other things, Manifest v3 limits the number of "rules" that extensions may apply to a web page as it loads. Rules are used, for example, to check if a website element comes from an advertiser's server and should therefore be blocked. Google announced the changes two years ago. Reducing the number of rules allowed angered creators of extensions like the uBlock Origin ad blocker and the Ghostery tracking blocker. They said the rules limits will stop their extensions from running their full lists of actions to screen ads or block tracking. That could let websites bypass extensions — and the preferences of people who installed them...

The shift brought on by Manifest V3 will spread to all browsers, to the detriment of ad blocking software, predicted Andrey Meshkov, co-founder and chief technology officer of AdGuard, an ad-blocking extension... Ghostery is working to update its extension for Manifest V3 but would rather spend its time on "real privacy innovations," President Jeremy Tillman said in a statement Wednesday. "We still have real misgivings that these changes have more to do with Google protecting its bottom line than it does with improving security for Chrome users...."

The importance of the Chrome team's choices are magnified by the fact that other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi , Opera and Brave, are built on its Chromium open-source foundation. Microsoft said it will embrace Manifest v3, too.
"Another Manifest v3 change is that extensions no longer may update their abilities by downloading code from third-party sites.

"The entire extension now must be distributed through the Chrome Web Store, a measure Google says improves security screens and speeds reviews."

Programming columnist Mike Melanson writes: As part of its involvement in the recently announced Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), Google has penned a blog post outlining one of the first steps it will take as part of this group, with an attempt at finding critical open source projects.

"Open source software (OSS) has long suffered from a 'tragedy of the commons' problem," they write. "Most organizations, large and small, make use of open source software every day to build modern products, but many OSS projects are struggling for the time, resources and attention they need."

So as a way to address this problem, and help fund those projects that need funding, Google is releasing the Criticality Score project. The project gives projects a criticality score (a number between 0 and 1) that is "is derived from various project usage metrics" such as "a project's age, number of individual contributors and organizations involved, user involvement (in terms of new issue requests and updates), and a rough estimate of its dependencies using commit mentions." From there, you can also add your own metrics, if you see fit...

Abhishek Arya, one of the project's creators, points out that the project is still in its initial phases and welcoming feedback on "any ideas on metrics we can use." Arya also notes that the project is currently limited to ranking open source projects hosted on GitHub, but "will be expanding to our source control system in the near future."

"Though we have made some progress on this problem, we have not solved it and are eager for the community's help in refining these metrics to identify critical open source projects," the blog post announcing the project concludes.

theodp writes: As the 8th annual Hour of Code kicked off this week, the College Board released 2020 AP national and state score breakouts for AP CS program participants. As in past years, this year's results still showed striking gaps in performance and participation across gender and ethnicity segments. Passing rates across major ethnic group segments ranged from 39.8%-78.6% for the Java-based AP CS A course, and 52%-83% for the newer "language agnostic" AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) course. Across gender segments, females accounted for 25% of AP CS A scores (16.2K of 64.9K total students) and 33.9% of AP CSP scores (38.6K of 113.9K students). Asian students accounted for 47% of all passing female AP CS A students. Due to pandemic-related school closures, the overall number of students completing AP STEM-related courses in 2020 declined for all subjects except CS. AP CS A, which had an abbreviated taken-at-home final exam, saw a modest 1.5% YOY increase in completions, while AP CSP saw a whopping 21.5% YOY increase in completions, no doubt helped by the cancellation of its end-of-course exam, which was to have counted for 60% of scores (students were instead assessed only by their portfolio submissions).

Amazon.com, American Express, Daimler AG and Stripe are among those joining a new GitHub program that will let companies directly fund open-source projects and software developers that are key to their businesses. From a report: It's an expansion of GitHub's Sponsors program, which previously let individuals support software projects and the millions of developers who use the digital platform to collaborate on, share and store code. GitHub, whose parent company Microsoft will also participate in the new service announced Tuesday, expects the change to dramatically increase the number of contributions. The year-old sponsors service has already generated enough money for some developers to rely on it as full-time work, said Devon Zuegel, GitHub's director of product for the communities department.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Advent of Code isn't the only geeky tradition that's continuing in 2020. "This is going to be the first full year with Raku being called Raku," notes the site raku-advent.blog. "However, it's going to be the 12th year (after this first article) in a row with a Perl 6 or Raku calendar, previously published in the Perl 6 Advent Calendar blog." The tradition continues, with a new article about the Raku programming language every day until Christmas.

And meanwhile over at perladvent.org, the Perl Advent Calendar is also continuing its own article-a-day tradition (starting with a holiday tale about how Perl's TidyAll library "makes it trivial for the elves to keep their code formatting consistent and clean.")

But they're not the only ones. "Pandemic or not, Christmas time is a time for wonder, joy and sharing," writes Kristofer Giltvedt Selbekk from Oslo-based Bekk Consulting (merging technology with user experience, product innovation and strategy). So this year they're "continuing our great tradition of sharing some of the stuff we know every December" with 11 different advent calendar sites sharing articles (or, on one site, podcast episodes), on topics including JavaScript, Kotlin, React, Elm, functional programming, and cloud computing.

And if you're more interested in outer space, this also marks the 13th year for the official Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. "Every day until Friday, December 25, this page will present one new incredible image of our universe from NASA's Hubble telescope," explains its page at the Atlantic.
There's also a series of daily coding challenges called "24 days of JavaScriptmas" at the tutorial site Scrimba, which has turned the event into a marketing opportunity by promising a $1,000 prize on Christmas Eve to one lucky participant chosen from the ones who publicized their solutions on Twitter.

This week the Microsoft-owned code repository site GitHub released its annual report with statistics about its community, writes programming columnist Mike Melanson: The report offers a deep dive into three specific areas, with a look at developer productivity in the time of COVID, community and collaboration, and open source security. Highlights include increased productivity with 35% more repositories created in 2020 than 2019, a large open source community with more than 56M developers in 2020 with 100M expected by 2025, and security vulnerabilities that often go undetected for more than 4 years before being disclosed and 94% of projects relying on open source components.
"2020 has been a year of extraordinary change," notes GitHub's report. "Yet with 60M+ new repositories created this past year, one thing has remained true — developers came together from all corners of the world to innovate, find connection, and solve problems."

GitHub reports that over 1.9 billion contributions were added in the last year, with users distributed around the globe:

North America:	34%
Asia:	30.7%
Europe:	26.8%
South America:	4.9%
Africa:	2%
Oceania:	1.7%

And while JavaScript is still the most popular language used on the site, Python remains more popular (at #2) than Java (at #3) for the second year in a row.

1. JavaScript
2. Python
3. Java
4. TypeScript
5. C#
6. PHP
7. C++
8. C
9. Shell
10. Ruby