An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Sourcegraph, a company specializing in universal code search, polled more than 500 North American software developers to identify issues in code complexity and management. Its general findings are probably no surprise to most Ars readers — software has gotten bigger, more complex, and much more important in the past ten years — but the sheer scope can be surprising... When asked how the size of the codebase across their entire company, measured in megabytes and the number of repositories, has changed in the past decade, over half (51%) of software development stakeholders reported they have more than 100 times the volume of code they had 10 years ago. And a staggering 18% say they have 500 times more code.
Ars also reports another surprising finding: 91% of the surveyed developers said their non-technology company "functions more like a technology company than it did ten years ago.

"This won't surprise anyone who has noticed firms like Walmart Labs sponsoring open source technology conferences and delivering presentations."

"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.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, writing at CNBC: In the first few years of Netflix, we were growing fast and needed to hire more software engineers. With my new understanding that high talent density would be the engine of our success, we focused on finding the top performers in the market. In Silicon Valley, many of them worked for Google, Apple, and Facebook -- and they were being paid a lot. We didn't have the cash to lure them away in any numbers. But, as an engineer, I was familiar with a concept that has been understood in software since 1968, referred to as the "rock-star principle." The rock-star principle is rooted in a famous study that took place in a basement in Santa Monica, California. At 6:30 a.m., nine trainee programmers were led into a room with dozens of computers. Each was handed a manila envelope, explaining a series of coding and debugging tasks they would need to complete to their best ability in the next 120 minutes. The researchers expected that the best programmer would outperform his average counterpart by a factor of two or three. But it turned out that the most skilled programmer far outperformed the worst. He was 20 times faster at coding, 25 times faster at debugging, and 10 times faster at program execution than the programmer with the lowest marks.

This study has caused ripples across the software industry since it was published, as managers grapple with how some programmers can be worth so much more than their perfectly adequate colleagues. With a fixed amount of money for salaries and a project I needed to complete, I had a choice: Hire 10 to 25 average engineers, or hire one "rock-star" and pay significantly more than what I'd pay the others, if necessary. Over the years, I've come to see that the best programmer doesn't add 10 times the value. He or she adds more like a 100 times. Bill Gates, whom I worked with while on the Microsoft board, purportedly went further. He is often quoted as saying, "A great lathe operator commands several times the wages of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer." In the software industry, this is a known principle (although still much debated). I started thinking about where this model applied outside the software industry. The reason the rock-star engineer is so much more valuable than his counterparts isn't unique to programming. The great software engineer is incredibly creative and can see conceptual patterns that others can't.

"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.

Michael Ilseman, an engineer on the Swift Standard Library team at Apple, writes: In June, Apple introduced Swift System, a new library for Apple platforms that provides idiomatic interfaces to system calls and low-level currency types. Today, I'm excited to announce that we're open-sourcing System and adding Linux support! Our vision is for System to eventually act as the single home for low-level system interfaces for all supported Swift platforms.

Legendary horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs is now open source, meaning that modders can dig in and see what lies underneath the hood of both games. Polygon reports: The full source code for The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs has been released on Github for folks who want to take a crack at modifying the game. It's relatively rare for developers to post their game codes themselves, though sometimes proprietary code can make its way online via leaks. "This doesn't mean that the game is suddenly free," Amnesia developer Frictional Games said in a blog post. "It just means that people are free to use the source however they want as long as they adhere to the GPL3 licence. The game and all of its content is still owned by Frictional Games. Just like before."

Seeing how these classic games are built will also mean seeing things like flaws, and inefficiencies Frictional Games warned -- but it's all still functional and potentially useful to anyone learning game development. "I also hope this release can be of help to anyone wanting to create their own engine or just wanting to learn more about game programming," Frictional Games said. "While the code is not the greatest in places and the tech used is not the latest, it is a fully contained game engine in a fairly easy-to-understand package. It is also a testament that it is possible to do this sort of thing, even with a very limited team."

Google has announced that Flutter, its open source UI development kit for building cross-platform software from the same codebase, is finally available for Windows apps in alpha. From a report:For the world's leading desktop operating system with some 1 billion installations of Windows 10 alone, this has been a long time coming. Flutter's alpha incarnation was initially launched at Google's I/O developer conference back in 2017, before arriving in beta less than a year later. In its original guise, Flutter was designed for Android and iOS app development, but it has since expanded to cover the web, MacOS, and Linux, which are currently available in various alpha or beta iterations. Developers have had to consider unique platform-specific factors when designing for the desktop or mobile phones, such as different screen sizes and how people interact with their devices. On smartphones, people typically use touch and swipe-based gestures, while keyboards and mice are commonly used on PCs and laptops. This means Flutter has had to expand its support to cover the additional inputs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos on Tuesday announced he's soon opening the first location of a network of tuition-free "Montessori-inspired" preschools for underserved children. In an Instagram post, Bezos said the first Bezos Academy will open in Des Moines, Wash., on Oct. 19. The network of schools will offer year-round programming, five days a week, for children between the ages of 3 and 5. Admissions will prioritize low-income families, according to the Bezos Day One Fund website.

"This classroom is just the beginning," Bezos wrote in a post featuring a photo of a preschool classroom. "The @bezosacademy opens its doors on Oct. 19th. This one in Des Moines, WA, is the first of many free preschools that we'll be opening for underserved children." The nonprofit organization says it wants to run the schools using the same set of principles that have driven e-commerce giant Amazon. "Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer," the organization said on its website.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "If we want all students to learn computer science (CS for All), we have to go to where the students are," writes University of Michigan Grand Valley State University CS Professor Mark Guzdial. "Unfortunately, that's not computer science class. In most US states, less than 5% of high school students take a course in computer science.

"Programming is applicable and useful in many domains today, so one answer is to use programming in science, mathematics, social studies, and other non-CS classes. We take programming to where the students are, and hope to increase their interest and knowledge about CS."

America's National Science Foundation (NSF) was intrigued enough by this idea to fund Creating Adoptable Computing Education Integrated into Social Studies Classes, a three-year project created by Guzdial and Grand Valley State University history professor Tamara Shreiner, a project which "aims to provide more students computing education by integrating programming activities into social studies classes and to use the computing to enhance students' data literacy." Along the same lines, the NSF has also greenlighted Northwestern University's CS professor Marcelo Worsley's Computational Thinking and Physical Computing in Physical Education for this fall, which will bring computer science to K-5 gym classes.

While the tech giants have lobbied for billions in spending on "rigorous" K-12 CS courses, could it be that the best "CS class" for most K-12 students is no CS class?

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."

"Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to Linux kernel developers," reports ZDNet, "requesting that Linux run as the root partition on the Hyper-V, its hypervisor software for running Windows and non-Windows instances on hardware." Microsoft "wants to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor", according to Microsoft principle software engineer Wei Liu. Liu has proposed an RFC or request for comment that for now merely implements what are only the "absolutely necessary components to get things running... There will be a subsequent patch series to provide a device node (/dev/mshv) such that userspace programs can create and run virtual machines. We've also ported Cloud Hypervisor over and have been able to boot a Linux guest with Virtio devices since late July." Cloud Hypervisor is an experimental open-source hypervisor implementation from Intel written in the Rust programming language. It's a virtual-machine monitor that runs on top of KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor in the Linux kernel that's designed for cloud workloads...

Liu points out three more changes beyond amendments to the Hyper-V Top-Level Functional Specification. For example, Microsoft wants Linux to set up existing Hyper-V facilities differently. It also wants Linux kernel developers to change the kernel's behavior when accessing hardware memory in a way that affects driver access to the GPU and CPU that's being managed by an operating system memory manager. It's this issue that Microsoft engineers are least confident about and are asking for Linux developer support, according to Liu....

As Microsoft's executive VP of the cloud and enterprise group, Scott Guthrie, told ZDNet last year, Microsoft's shift to Linux and open source started over a decade ago when it open-sourced ASP.NET. "We recognized open source is something that every developer can benefit from. It's not nice, it's essential. It's not just code, it's community," explained Guthrie.

DC Universe, which started out as a streaming service for original DC superhero content, will in January become DC Universe Infinite, a supersized subscription service for DC Comics. CNET reports: The service launches on Jan. 21 for $7.99 per month, or $74.99 for a year-long subscription. DC says that subscribers will be able to read 24,000 comic book titles at launch, along with digital-first titles and access to exclusive fan events. Recently released titles featuring Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and other DC mainstays will make their way onto the platform in digital format six months after the physical copies arrive in stores. Those who subscribe during the initial preorder run will receive a $10 voucher to the DC Shop on Feb. 1 -- and make that $25 if you lock in a year-long subscription.

The move comes as DC nestles in with HBO, with original DC programming making a home on the HBO Max streaming service. A third season of the Harley Quinn animated series starring Kaley Cuoco was just announced for the platform earlier today, with all seasons of the show now sitting as an HBO exclusive. [...] To that end, DC is extending its offer for DC Universe subscribers to add HBO Max membership for $4.99 per month. Fans can jump on that deal through the end of October.

While developers have had access to beta versions of the software updates since June, many were caught off guard by Apple's much shorter notice of the final releases. By comparison, Apple started accepting apps built for iOS 13 on September 10 last year, over one week before the software update was released on September 19. From a story yesterday: "I think a lot of developers won't be sleeping tonight or will instead just give up and opt to release [their app] when they want to, instead of alongside the new OS," said iOS developer Shihab Mehboob in a message. "Apple has seemingly out of the blue decided to surprise developers with no real warning or care." [...] "Without advance warning like this, nothing is ready," a developer at High Caffeine Content, Steve Troughton-Smith, told me. "Developers aren't ready, the App Store is't ready, and everybody is rushing to react instead of having the chance to finish their apps properly." Steve ran through the normal iOS release process with me. Apple usually gives third-party app developers a heads up of about a week before the official public release of a new iOS. The company puts out a "Golden Master" copy of the new iOS and Xcode developer tool before the latest operating system is officially released to the public. This gives iPhone app developers the time they need to make sure the apps they've been building for the beta releases of the new iOS actually work on the final version. Sometimes there are critical bugs that are only revealed or could only be fixed at this point in the process.

The extra time can also be used to add new features for any new devices announced at the Apple Event. Apple's approval process for apps also takes some time, so developers have that week to make sure they submit in time to guarantee their work will be in the App Store for the iOS release. "Gone are the hopes of being on the store by the time users install the new iOS 14 and are looking for new apps. Gone is the chance to get some last-minute fixes into your existing apps to make sure they don't stop working outright by the time users get to upgrade their OS," explained Steve. "There are some developers who have spent all summer working on something new, using the latest technologies, hoping to be there on day one and participate in the excitement (and press coverage) of the new iOS," he continued. "For many of them, they'll be incredibly upset to have it end like this instead of a triumphant launch, and it can dramatically decrease the amount of coverage or sales they receive."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares Wikipedia's entry reminding us that this year's "Day of the Programmer" falls on September 13: The Day of the Programmer is an international professional day that is celebrated on the 256th (hexadecimal 100th, or the 2**8th) day of each year (September 13 during common years and on September 12 in leap years). It is officially recognized in Russia.

The number 256 (2**8) was chosen because it is the number of distinct values that can be represented with a byte, a value well known to programmers...

In China, the programmer's day is October 24, which has been established for many years. The date was chosen because it can also be written as 1024, which is equal to 210. It is also consistent regardless of leap years.
The original submission suggests we celebrate with "this delightful acoustic version of Code Monkey, which songwriter Jonathan Coulton describes as "how it feels to write software for a living."

But did any Slashdot readers even know today was The Day of the Programmer?

ZDNet reports: The International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) C++ group, Working Group 21 (WG21), has agreed upon the finalized version of 'C++20', the first major update to the 35 year-old programming language since C++17 from 2017... The 2020 release of C++ is huge by historical standards. Herb Sutter, a Microsoft engineer and long-time chair of WG21 C++ ISO committee, said it "will be C++'s largest release since C++11", meaning it's bigger than any of the past three releases, which happen every three years. It's also the first version that has been standardized....

Two of the most important features coming to C++20 are "modules" and "coroutines". Modules, which was led by Google's Richard Smith, stands in for header files and helps isolate the effects of macros while supporting larger builds. As Sutter noted recently, C++20 marks the "first time in about 35 years that C++ has added a new feature where users can define a named encapsulation boundary...."

Coroutines represents a generalization of a function. "Regular functions always start at the beginning and exit at the end, whereas coroutines can also suspend the execution to be resumed later at the point where they were left off," C++ contributors explain in a proposal for coroutines.
"We expect it to be formally published toward the end of 2020," Sutter said said in an announcement.

Interestingly, the year C++ was first released in 1985, Microsoft used it to build Windows 1.0, ZDNet points out. "These days Microsoft is exploring Mozilla-developed Rust to replace legacy Windows code written in C and C++ because of Rust's memory safety qualities."

Apple adjusted its App Store review guidelines to loosen restrictions on iPhone and iPad games that stream directly from the internet and in-app purchase rules that have frustrated developers. From a report: The changes mean Apple will approve games that stream from the web, versus from content installed on a device, for the first time. That reverses a rule that frustrated companies including Microsoft. The new rules will still require games to be submitted individually. That means companies still won't be able to launch all-you-can-eat streaming game services on Apple's platform. However, these services can now offer a catalog that directs users to other streaming games from the same developer. But that catalog must point players to the App Store to download those other games individually. Apple is also no longer imposing its in-app purchase requirements on online teaching apps, such as tutoring or workout offerings.

As coronavirus news was increasingly trapped behind the Great Firewall, the programming platform became a refuge from censorship. It may not last long. From a report: When the coronavirus first spread through China in January, Chinese PhD student Weilei Zeng watched the pandemic unfold online from his apartment in Riverside, California. Thousands of miles from home, he frantically tried to keep up with news of the crisis, following the rare outpouring of discontent that flooded Chinese social media: lockdown diaries penned by anxious patients; video footage of overcrowded hospitals; tributes to Li Wenliang, the young doctor who was reprimanded for "rumor-mongering" when he first warned the public about the virus (and would die of Covid-19 only a month later). Then, inevitably, as Chinese censors stepped in to scrub the internet clean, Zeng would return to a link he'd visited just a few days earlier to find only the familiar 404 error message -- indicating that the page had vanished. Zeng soon discovered that these posts were not gone. Many had been preserved and quietly tucked away in an unexpected corner of the internet: GitHub, the world's largest open source software site. Founded in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft in 2018, GitHub is popular among developers and programmers, who use the platform mostly to share and crowdsource code. Zeng often used it as a way to collaborate with his university peers on research projects. But after the pandemic hit, he stumbled on thousands of Chinese internet users repurposing GitHub as a Covid-19 archive, racing against censors to document the outbreak in the form of news articles, medical journals, and personal accounts.

One collaborative project, known as a "repository," was named #2020nCovMemory. Founded by seven volunteers from around the world, it included everything from investigative reports published by Chinese news magazine Caixin to the diary entries of Wuhan writer Fang Fang, who criticized the local government's suppression of information and initial failure to warn the public about the virus. Another repository, called Terminus2049 -- named after a planet in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series -- collected sensitive articles that were otherwise inaccessible behind China's Great Firewall, such as an interview with Ai Fen, the doctor who first discovered the virus in December. In February, Zeng joined a repository called 2020nCov_individual_archives, to crowdsource online diary entries and citizens' accounts of everyday life during the pandemic. "It made me feel much more at peace, knowing that these stories were being saved somewhere," Zeng says. On the Chinese internet, global social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are banned, and domestic platforms like WeChat and Weibo are strictly monitored. But GitHub, known to some Chinese internet users as the "last land of free speech in China," remains accessible. Chinese authorities cannot censor individual projects, because GitHub uses the HTTPS protocol, which encrypts all traffic.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On September 1st, 2010, Epic Games released its Citadel tech demo in the Apple App Store. It was a boring thing to actually play -- you simply walked around a medieval town in first-person perspective, taking in the sights with no objectives -- but this calm debut marked a big moment for iOS, the App Store, and Epic Games. It proved that developers could fit gigantic, richly detailed set pieces running on a smartphone and do it while utilizing Unreal Engine 3, the same engine that powered some of the most popular games in the Xbox 360 and PS3 era of consoles. The devices of choice, if you wanted to get access to mobile games with impressive graphics, were suddenly just the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The Citadel demo didn't come to Android until almost two and a half years later in 2013.

The Citadel demo was groundbreaking at the time, and it possibly helped to kickstart the trend of bringing console-like experiences to the nascent mobile gaming platform. When I first saw it, I remember feeling like I immediately needed to throw my HTC Droid Eris out the window and buy an iPhone instead. I eventually got to try it out on an iPad at the gadget store where I was employed at the time, and it was stunning to see high-fidelity textures that had dimension and lighting that dynamically shifted when you walked into a building. There were even reflections at a certain point. I had played better-looking games on PC at that point, but something about the experience of being packed into a tiny device made for a magical proof of concept that left an impact on me, even as the fun of walking around Citadel lost its appeal. Ten years later, things are very different. Right now, Epic Games and Apple are in the midst of a high-profile legal battle that will likely have a serious impact on their relationship moving forward.

Higher ratings are the 'lifeblood' of the smartphone app world but what if they are inflated? From a report: Rating an iPhone app takes just a second, maybe two. "Enjoying Skype?" a prompt will ask, and you click on a 1-5 star rating. Millions of people respond to these requests, giving little thought to their fleeting whim. Behind the scenes, though, an entire industry has spent countless hours and lines of code to craft this moment. The prompt, seemingly random, can be orchestrated to hit your glowing screen only at times when you are most likely to leave a five star review. Gaming apps will solicit a rating just after you reach a high score. Banking apps will ask when they know it's payday. Gambling apps will prompt users after they are dealt the perfect Blackjack hand. A sporting app will give the nudge only when a user's team is winning.

Apple has for a decade clamped down on "ratings farms" and "download bots" that companies use to fraudulently garner five-star scores and manipulate App Store rankings. And it has had some success. But these are blunt instruments trying to cheat the system in clear violation of Apple's rules. The more sophisticated techniques stay within the rules but draw on behavioural psychology to understand your mood, emotions and behaviour -- they are not hacking the system; they are hacking your brain. "The algorithms that are used are very hush-hush," says Saoud Khalifah, chief executive of Fakespot, a service that analyses the authenticity of reviews on the web. "They can target you when you are euphoric, when you have a lot of dopamine. They can use machine learning to determine [when] a user will be more inclined to leave positive reviews."

China's enthusiasm for teaching children to code is facing a new roadblock as organizations and students lose an essential tool: the Scratch programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. From a report: China-based internet users can no longer access Scratch's website. Greatfire.org, an organization that monitors internet censorship in China, shows that the website was 100% blocked as early as August 20, while a Scratch user flagged the ban on August 14. Nearly 60 million children around the world have used Scratch's visual programming language to make games, animations, stories and the likes. That includes students in China, which is seeing a gold rush to early coding as the country tries to turn its 200 million kids into world-class tech talents. At last count, 5.65% or 3 million of Scratch's registered users are based in China, though its reach is greater than the figure suggests as many Chinese developers have built derivatives based on Scratch, an open-source software.