Python's creator Guido van Rossum shared his opinions on other programming languages during a new hour-long interview with Microsoft's principle cloud advocate manager. Some of the highlights:

• Rust: "It sounds like it's a great language — for certain things. Rust really improves on C++ in one particular area — it makes it much harder to bypass the checks in the compiler. And of course it solves the memory allocation problem in a near perfect way... if you wrote the same thing in C++, you could not be as sure, as compared to Rust, that you've gotten all your memory allocation and memory management stuff right. So Rust is an interesting language."

• Go and Julia: "I still think that Go is a very interesting language too. Of all the new languages, Go is probably the most Python-ic — or at least the general-purpose new languages. There's also Julia, which is sort of an interesting sort of take on something Python-like. It has enough details that look very similar to Python that then when you realize, 'Oh, but all the indexing is one-based and ranges are inclusive instead of exclusive,' you think, 'Argh!' Nobody should ever try to code in Julia and in Python on the same day.
  
  "My understanding is that Julia is sort of much more of a niche language, and if you're in that niche, it is superior because the compiler optimizes your code for you in a way that Python probably never will. On the other hand, it is much more limited in other areas, and I wouldn't expect that anybody ever is going to write a web server in Julia and get a lot of mileage out of it. And I'm sure in five minutes that will be on Hacker News with a counterexample."

• TypeScript: "TypeScript is a great language. You might have noticed that in the past six or seven years, we've been adding optional static typing to Python, also known as gradual typing. I wasn't actually aware of TypeScript when we started that project, so I can't say that we were inspired by TypeScript initially. TypeScript, because it sort of jumped on the JavaScript bandwagon — and because Anders is a really smart guy — TypeScript did a few things that Python is still waiting to figure out. So nowadays, we definitely look at TypeScript for examples. We have a typing SIG where we discuss extensions of the typing syntax and semantics and the type system in general for Python, and we definitely sometimes propose new features because we know that certain features were also originally initially lacking in TypeScript, and then added to TypeScript based on user demand, and [became] very successful in TypeScript. And so now we can see we are in that same situation.
  
  "Because JavaScript and Python are relatively similar... Much more so than Python and say C++ or Rust or Java. So we are learning from TypeScript, and occasionally, from my conversations with Anders, it sounds like TypeScript is also learning from Python, just like JavaScript has learned from Python in a few areas."

"The official Python software package repository, PyPI, is getting flooded with spam packages..." Bleeping Computer reported Thursday.

"Each of these packages is posted by a unique pseudonymous maintainer account, making it challenging for PyPI to remove the packages and spam accounts all at once..." PyPI is being flooded with spam packages named after popular movies in a style commonly associated with torrent or "warez" sites that provide pirated downloads: watch-(movie-name)-2021-full-online-movie-free-hd-... Although some of these packages are a few weeks old, BleepingComputer observed that spammers are continuing to add newer packages to PyPI... The web page for these bogus packages contain spam keywords and links to movie streaming sites, albeit of questionable legitimacy and legality...

February of this year, PyPI had been flooded with bogus "Discord", "Google", and "Roblox" keygens in a massive spam attack, as reported by ZDNet. At the time, Ewa Jodlowska, Executive Director of the Python Software Foundation had told ZDNet that the PyPI admins were working on addressing the spam attack, however, by the nature of pypi.org, anyone could publish to the repository, and such occurrences were common.

Other than containing spam keywords and links to quasi-video streaming sites, these packages contain files with functional code and author information lifted from legitimate PyPI packages... As previously reported by BleepingComputer, malicious actors have combined code from legitimate packages with otherwise bogus or malicious packages to mask their footsteps, and make the detection of these packages a tad more challenging...

In recent months, the attacks on open-source ecosystems like npm, RubyGems, and PyPI have escalated. Threat actors have been caught flooding software repositories with malware, malicious dependency confusion copycats, or simply vigilante packages to spread their message. As such, securing these repositories has turned into a whack-a-mole race between threat actors and repository maintainers.

ZDNet reports: Guido van Rossum, who created popular programming language Python 30 years ago, has outlined his ambitions to make it twice as fast — addressing a key weakness of Python compared to faster languages like C++.

Speed in Core Python (CPython) is one of the reasons why other implementations have emerged, such as Pyston.... In a contribution to the U.S. PyCon Language Summit this week, van Rossum posted a document on Microsoft-owned GitHub, first spotted by The Register, detailing some of his ambitions to make Python a faster language, promising to double its speed in Python 3.11 — one of three Python branches that will emerge next year in a pre-alpha release... van Rossum was "given freedom to pick a project" at Microsoft and adds that he "chose to go back to my roots".

"This is Microsoft's way of giving back to Python," writes van Rossum... According to van Rossum, Microsoft has funded a small Python team to "take charge of performance improvements" in the interpreted language...

He says that the main beneficiaries of upcoming changes to Python will be those running "CPU-intensive pure Python code" and users of websites with built-in Python.
The Register notes that the faster CPython project "has a GitHub repository which includes a fork of CPython as well as an issue tracker for ideas and tools for analysing performance."

"According to Van Rossum, there will be 'no long-lived forks/branches, no surprise 6,000 line pull requests,' and everything will be open source."

IBM announced during its Think 2021 conference on Monday that its researchers have crafted a Rosetta Stone for programming code. Engadget reports: In effect, we've taught computers how to speak human, so why not also teach computers to speak more computer? That's what IBM's Project CodeNet seeks to accomplish. "We need our ImageNet, which can snowball the innovation and can unleash this innovation in algorithms," [Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist at IBM Research, said during his Think 2021 presentation]. CodeNet is essentially the ImageNet of computers. It's an expansive dataset designed to teach AI/ML systems how to translate code and consists of some 14 million snippets and 500 million lines spread across more than 55 legacy and active languages -- from COBOL and FORTRAN to Java, C++, and Python.

"Since the data set itself contains 50 different languages, it can actually enable algorithms for many pairwise combinations," Puri explained. "Having said that, there has been work done in human language areas, like neural machine translation which, rather than doing pairwise, actually becomes more language-independent and can derive an intermediate abstraction through which it translates into many different languages." In short, the dataset is constructed in a manner that enables bidirectional translation. That is, you can take some legacy COBOL code -- which, terrifyingly, still constitutes a significant amount of this country's banking and federal government infrastructure -- and translate it into Java as easily as you could take a snippet of Java and regress it back into COBOL.

CodeNet can be used for functions like code search and clone detection, in addition to its intended translational duties and serving as a benchmark dataset. Also, each sample is labeled with its CPU run time and memory footprint, allowing researchers to run regression studies and potentially develop automated code correction systems. Project CodeNet consists of more than 14 million code samples along with 4000-plus coding problems collected and curated from decades' of programming challenges and competitions across the globe. "The way the data set actually came about," Puri said, "there are many kinds of programming competitions and all kinds of problems -- some of them more businesslike, some of them more academic. These are the languages that have been used over the last decade and a half in many of these competitions with 1000s of students or competitors submitting solutions." Additionally, users can run individual code samples "to extract metadata and verify outputs from generative AI models for correctness," according to an IBM press release. "This will enable researchers to program intent equivalence when translating one programming language into another." [...] IBM intends to release the CodeNet data to the public domain, allowing researchers worldwide equal and free access.

Analyst firm SlashData surveyed over 19,000 respondents from 155 countries for its "State of the Developer Nation" survey — and now estimates that there's 24.3 million active developers worldwide.

TechRadar reports: The report pegs JavaScript as the most popular language that, together with variants including TypeScript and CoffeeScript, is used by almost 14 million developers around the world. Based on SlashData's observations over the past several years, more than 4.5 million JavaScript developers have joined the ranks between Q4 2017 and Q1 2021. This is the highest growth in terms of absolute numbers across all programming languages...

Next up is Python with just over 10 million users, followed by Java with 9.4 million, and C/C++ with 7.3 million. The report notes that Python added 1.6 million new developers in the past year, recording a growth rate of 20%.
From ZDNet: SlashData estimates the next three largest developer communities are using C/C++ (7.3 million), Microsoft's C# (6.5 million), and PHP (6.3 million). Other large groups of developers are fans of Kotlin, Swift, Go, Ruby, Objective C, Rust and Lua...

SlashData, however, notes that Rust and Lua were the two fastest growing programming language communities in the past 12 months, albeit from a lower base than Python.
And Visual Studio magazine couldn't resist emphasizing that C# "has ticked up a notch in popularity, overtaking PHP for No. 5 on that ranking..." "C# lost three places in the rankings of language communities between Q3 2019 and Q3 2020, but it regained its lead over PHP in the past six months after adding half a million developers," the report states... "C# is traditionally popular within the desktop developer community, but it's also the most broadly used language among AR/VR and game developers, largely due to the widespread adoption of the Unity game engine in these areas..."

It was a different story one year ago, when the 18th edition of the report said: "C# lost about 1M developers during 2019... [I]t seems to be losing its edge in desktop development — possibly due to the emergence of cross-platform tools based on web technologies."

The language might see more desktop development inroads as new initiatives from Microsoft such as Blazor Desktop (one of those "cross-platform tools based on web technologies") and .NET MAUI provide a wide array of desktop approaches.

Twitter user @mrcatacroquer, Manual Lucio Dallo, built the Yayagram -- a DIY project that makes sending and receiving voice and text messages over Telegram a physical process just like using an old-fashioned phone switchboard. Speaking to The Verge, Dallo says he built the machine to help stay in touch with his 96-year-old grandmother. From the report: To send a message, the user physically plugs in a cable next to the recipient's name. They then press and hold a button to record audio and speak into the integrated microphone. The message then appears on the recipient's phone like a regular voice note. And when the operator of the Yayagram receives a text message, it's printed off using a built-in thermal printer.

Dallo, who's a senior engineer for software firm Plastic SCM, goes into some detail about how the device was made in this Twitter thread. It's powered by a Raspberry Pi 4, runs on Python, and uses several third-party software libraries to tie everything together. The microphone is a cheap USB one and the printer similar to those used in cashier tills. He notes that he chose to use Telegram rather than WhatsApp or another messaging service as it's more open (and he doesn't like Facebook).

Long-time Slashdot reader xiando quotes LinuxReviews: The community distribution Arch Linux has up to now required you to manually install it by entering a whole lot of scary commands in a terminal. Arch version 2021.04.01 features a new guided installer [reached by] typing python -m archinstall guided into the console you get when you boot the Arch Linux installation ISO.

It is not very novice-friendly, or user-friendly, but it gets the job done and it will work fine for those with some basic GNU/Linux knowledge.
Tech Radar writes that previously Arch Linux had "a rather convoluted installation process, which has given rise to a stream of Arch-based distros that are easier to install," adding that the new installer "was reportedly promoted as an official installation mechanism back in January, and was actively worked upon leading to its inclusion in the installation medium." Users have been calling on Arch Linux for simplifying the installation process for a long time, to bring it in line with other Linux distros. However, the Arch philosophy has always been to put the users in charge of every aspect of their installation, which is the antithesis of automated installers.
Phoronix calls the new installer "very quick and easy," although "granted not as user-friendly / polished as say the Debian Installer, Red Hat's Anaconda installer, even Ubuntu's Subiquity, and other TUI/GUI Linux installers out there." They also note that Archinstall "does allow automatically partitioning the drive with your choice of file-system options, automatically installing a desktop environment if desired, configuring the network interfaces, and all the other basics." The method is quick enough that I'll likely use archinstall for future Arch Linux benchmarks on Phoronix as it also then applies a sane set of defaults for users... Five minutes or less and off to the races, ready for Arch Linux."
But Slashdot reader I75BJC still favors "scary commands in a terminal," leaving this comment on the original submission: If you can't type with the big adults, stay on your PlayStation.

Even Apple, with its very good GUI has a command line. The command line commands are more flexible, more specific, more subtle than the pointy-clicky GUI.

Monty Python alumnus John Cleese "is going to be selling an illustration of the Brooklyn Bridge he did on his iPad as an NFT," reports Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair.

So far the highest offer is $50,000, though Cleese's "buy it now" price has been set higher — at $69,346,250.50. But marveling at the wild popularity of NFTs, Bilton muses (hyperbolically?) that "The crazy thing is, he actually might get it..." The rapper Ja Rule recently launched an NFT platform on which he's selling a painting from the disastrous Fyre Festival with a starting bid of $600,000. Collectible NBA trading cards called "Top Shots," which are essentially digital trading cards of basketball players, are selling (and people are buying them) for as much as $240,000 ($208,000 is the highest price sold so far). And Beeple, a 39-year-old man from Charleston, South Carolina, whom you had never heard of until three weeks ago but who is now all anyone can talk about, a guy who makes dark and atramentous memeified "works of art," including pieces featuring a naked Elon Musk riding a Dogecoin dog and an image of a postcoital Santa Claus after — one assumes? — he's just cheated on Mrs. Claus, managed to sell a random pixelated artwork to another cryptocurrency investor at auction this month for $69,346,250 — exactly 50 cents less than John Cleese, I mean the Unnamed Artist, hopes to sell the Brooklyn Bridge for...

[T]hese odd things called NFTs have done the miraculous and created scarcity in a digital world where there is, by default, no such thing. As such, like any collectible or limited number of artworks, people have gone crazy to get a slice of this new fortune. The insanity around NFTs, and what is now for sale as an NFT, has whiplashed from obscurity to frenetic hysteria in just a matter of weeks. While Ja Rule and trading cards and Beeple's "artwork" are often talked about with perplexity, there are countless NFTs hitting the specialized trading markets almost hourly.

Some are stunts, some are pitched as real art, and there's everything in between. A company that specializes in blockchain technology, for example, purchased a real, physical print by the artist Banksy for $95,000, then lit the print on fire until it was destroyed, and then sold a digital version of it as an NFT for almost $400,000. Grimes, the musician, sold about $6 million worth of music-and-video NFTs last month. Jack Dorsey's first tweet is currently at auction with a high bid of $2.5 million. A poker player is selling his most famous quotes as NFTs. The TV show American Gods is shilling trading cards of the show's characters as NFTs. The website Quartz is offering a news article about NFTs as an NFT itself. There's an NFT house for sale, nudes of the actor Katie Cassidy at auction as NFTs, and there are all sorts of digital collectibles ranging from pixelated punks to impish kitty cats with wings. Now an Unnamed Artist has a bridge to sell you...

It's almost like we're living in a simulation that has sped up and no one knows where the pause button is. But that, sadly, is by design. Bitcoin, which is only a little over a decade old, was first adopted by the video game culture: nerds who thought it was cool to mine on their computers and collect these odd little coins, but who are now Bitcoin billionaires. They are using that money, like Monopoly money that turned real overnight, to dictate what is considered art culturally. In doing so, they are — some believe — destroying the culture.

In his This Week in Programming column, Mike Melanson writes: Rustaceans' dreams of Rust's inclusion in the Linux kernel are one tiny, ever so slight step closer to becoming a reality, with this week's "intentionally bare-bones" inclusion in Linux-next, the development branch of the Linux kernel... Curb your enthusiasm, however, as this remains a rather tentative first step of many necessary steps before Rust fully lands in the Linux kernel.

A rather brief post on LWN.net summarizes where we are rather succinctly:

Followers of the linux-next integration tree may have noticed a significant addition: initial support for writing device drivers in the Rust language. There is some documentation in Documentation/rust, while the code itself is in the rust top-level directory. Appearance in linux-next generally implies readiness for the upcoming merge window, but it is not clear if that is the case here; this code has not seen a lot of wider review yet. It is, regardless, an important step toward the ability to write drivers in a safer language.

Indeed, Miguel Ojeda, a software developer and maintainer of the Rust for Linux project writes that the proposed inclusion "does not mean we will make it into mainline, of course, but it is a nice step to make things as smooth as possible," with some changes expected before any decision as to Rust's inclusion are made.

For those of you less familiar with Rust, part of the appeal here comes with Rust's memory safety features, especially in comparison to C, which the Linux kernel is currently coded in. Part of the problem, however, is that Rust is compiled based on LLVM, as opposed to GCC, and subsequently supports fewer architectures. This is a problem we've seen play out recently, as the Python cryptography library has replaced some old C code with Rust, leading to a situation where certain architectures will not be supported. Presently, the proposal to include Rust in the Linux kernel limits this issue by saying that Rust would be used, at least initially, for writing drivers that, as noted in another LWN.net article on the topic, "would never be used on the more obscure architectures anyway."

InfoQ reports: Deno 1.8 recently shipped with plenty of new features, including WebGPU support, internationalization APIs, stabilized import maps, support for fetching private modules, and more. The Deno permissions API is now stable. Deno 1.8 additionally ships with TypeScript 4.2.

The release note explained the motivation behind the support for the WebGPU APIs as follows:

These days, most neural networks are defined in Python with the computation offloaded to GPUs. We believe JavaScript, instead of Python, could act as an ideal language for expressing mathematical ideas if the proper infrastructure existed. Providing WebGPU support out-of-the-box in Deno is a step in this direction. Our goal is to run Tensorflow.js on Deno, with GPU acceleration. We expect this to be achieved in the coming weeks or months.

WebGPU is an API originally proposed by Apple that exposes the GPU computation functionality available on many devices. WebGPU may provide better performance than WebGL in tasks that benefit from parallel processing — as often occurs in scientific computing, machine learning, graphics and games development...

Deno users can upgrade by running deno upgrade in a terminal.

"The huge parachute used by NASA's Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message," reports the Associated Press — thanks to the rover's puzzle-loving systems engineer Ian Clark.

"During a live stream discussing the landing, one Nasa commentator said: 'Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find. So we invite you all to give it a shot and show your work,'" reports the Guardian.

One Reddit user actually deciphered the message using Python code.

Long-time Slashdot reader rufey writes that "Decoded the slogan is 'Dare Mighty Things' — a line from President Theodore Roosevelt — which is a mantra at JPL and adorns many of the center's walls." The orange sections of the 70-foot (21-meter) parachute represented ones in binary code, while the yellow sections represented zeroes. (So the letter "A" becomes yellow-yellow-yellow-yellow-yellow-yellow-orange...) The Associated Press reports: Clark also included the GPS coordinates for the mission's headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Clark, a crossword hobbyist, came up with the idea two years ago. Engineers wanted an unusual pattern in the nylon fabric to know how the parachute was oriented during descent. Turning it into a secret message was "super fun," he said Tuesday. Only about six people knew about the encoded message before Thursday's landing, according to Clark. They waited until the parachute images came back before putting out a teaser during a televised news conference Monday...

Another added touch not widely known until touchdown: Perseverance bears a plaque depicting all five of NASA's Mars rovers in increasing size over the years — similar to the family car decals seen on Earth.

Deputy project manager Matt Wallace promises more so-called hidden Easter eggs...
The official Twitter feed for the rover has already revealed that it's carrying another message hidden in a plaque with a logo of the sun — "Explore as One," written in Morse code.

Some other interesting facts about the rover:

• NASA points out that Perseverance carried a special placard with 10,932,295 names, "stenciled by electron beam onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips."

• Space.com notes that it also carried a small aluminum plate honoring the healthcare workers of the world.

• NASA is encouraging children to code their own version of the helicopter using the visual programming language Scratch.

Results were announced this week for the fourth "official annual Python Developers Survey" of over 28,000 developers (in nearly 200 countries) conducted by the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains.

85% of the survey respondents use Python as their main programming language, InfoWorld reports: Python developers cite simplicity and ease of use as principal reasons for using the language, but they still want capabilities such as static typing and performance improvements, based on survey results released this week. Python's simple syntax, syntactic sugar, and ease of learning were the most-favored features, capturing 37% of respondents, who were asked which three features they liked the most...

Which three features would Python developers most like to see added to the language? Static typing and strict type hinting proved to be the most-desired features, with 21% of respondents, closely followed by performance improvements, with 20%. Better concurrency and parallelism came in third, with 15% saying they were their most-desired capabilities.
InfoWorld also describes some other interesting results:

• "JavaScript was the most popular language used in conjunction with Python, with about 42% of respondents using both together. 75% of web developers said they were using both Python and JavaScript."

• "Just 8% of Python developers performing data-related tasks do not use any additional languages while only 3% of web developers use only Python."

• "Use of Python 3 has grown from 75% in 2017 to 94% in 2020."

Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Deno, gave a new interview this week to the IT outsourcing company Evrone: Evrone: You have hands-on experience with lots of programming languages: C, Rust, Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript. Which one do you enjoy the most to work with?

Ryan: I have the most fun writing Rust these days. It has a steep learning curve and is not appropriate for many problems; but for the stuff I'm working on now it's perfect. It's a much better C++. I'm convinced that I will never start a new C++ project. Rust is beautiful in its ability to express low-level machinery with such simplicity.

JavaScript has never been my favorite language — it's just the most common language — and for that reason it is a useful way to express many ideas. I don't consider TypeScript a separate language; its beauty is that it's just marked up JavaScript. TypeScript allows one to build larger, more robust systems in JavaScript, and I'd say it's my go-to language for small everyday tasks.

With Deno we are trying to remove a lot of the complexity inherent in transpiling TypeScript code down to JavaScript with the hope this will enable more people to utilize it.

Evrone: Gradual typing was successfully added into core Python, PHP, and Ruby. What, in your opinion, is the main showstopper for adding types into JavaScript?

Ryan: Types were added to JavaScript (with TypeScript) far more successfully than has been accomplished in Python, PHP, or Ruby. TypeScript is JavaScript with types. The better question is: what is blocking the JavaScript standardization organization (TC39) from adopting TypeScript? Standardization, by design, moves slowly and carefully. They are first looking into proposing Types-As-Comments, which would allow the JavaScript runtimes to execute TypeScript syntax by ignoring the types. I think eventually TypeScript (or something like it) will be proposed as part of the JavaScript standard, but that will take time.

Evrone: As a respectable VIM user, what do you think of modern programmer editors like Visual Studio Code? Are they good enough for the old guard?

Ryan: Everyone I work with uses vscode and they love it. Probably most people should use that.

I continue to use VIM for two reasons. 1) I'm just very familiar and fast with it, I like being able to work over ssh and tmux and I enjoy the serenity of a full screen terminal. 2) It's important for software infrastructure to be text-based and accessible with simple tools. In the Java world they made the mistake of tying the IDEs too much into the worldflows of the language, creating a situation where practically one was forced to use an IDE to program Java. By using simple tooling myself, I ensure that the software I develop does not become unnecessarily reliant on IDEs. If you use grep instead of jump-to-definition too much indirection becomes intolerable. For what I do, I think this results in better software.

Today is the 30th anniversary of the Python programming language, "which has never been more popular, arguably thanks to the rise of data science and AI projects in the enterprise," writes Venture Beat.

To celebrate the historical releases file has been updated to include Guido van Rossum's original 0.9.1 beta release from 1991. (Its ReadMe file advises that Python 0.9 "can be used instead of shell, Awk or Perl scripts, to write prototypes of real applications, or as an extension language of large systems, you name it.")

And meanwhile, VentureBeat interviewed Pablo Galindo, one of the five members of the 2021 Python Steering Council and a software engineer at Bloomberg: VentureBeat: What's your current assessment of Python?

Galindo: Python is a very mature language, and it has evolved. It also has a bunch of things that it carries over. Python has some baggage that nowadays feels a bit old, but the community and the ecosystem has to be preserved. It's similar to how C and C++ are evolving right now. When you make changes to the language, it's quite dangerous [because you can] break things. That's what people are scared of the most.

But even though Python is quite old, there are big changes. The Python 3.1 release for this October will include pattern matching, which is one of the biggest syntax changes that Python has seen in a long time. We can learn from other languages. I think we're happy to say that we are still evolving and adapting. We have a good experience with respecting the importance of backwards compatibility.

VentureBeat: If you could be Python king for a day, what would you change?

Galindo: I would be a horrible King for a day. The first order of business would be to fix all these things that we have acquired over the years in the language. That would require breaking a bunch of things. Obviously, I will not do that, but I think one of the things I really would like to see in the future is for Python to become faster than it is. I think Python still has a lot of potential to become faster. I'm thinking this will be impossible. But one can dream.

VentureBeat: What do you know now about Python today that you wish you knew when you first began using it?

Galindo: I think the most important thing I learned is how many different uses there are for Python. It's important to listen to all these sorts of users when considering the evolution of the language. It's quite surprising and quite revealing to consider how changes or improvements will conflict or will interact with other users of the language.

That's something that when I started I didn't even consider. It would be good if people could be empathetic to us changing the language when we have to balance these things.

In its ongoing attempt to gauge the popularity of programming languages, "C is at the top of the list of TIOBE'S Index for February 2021 with Java in second place," reports TechRepublic: Those two languages swapped positions on the list as compared to 2020, but the rest of the list is almost exactly the same as a year ago. Python is in the No. 3 spot followed by C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL.

Assembly Language rounds out the top 10 list, up from spot 12 in 2020. R moved up two spots over the last year from 13 to 11. Groovy jumped to the 12h spot, up from 26 a year ago. Classic Visual Basic is on the rise also moving up four spots to 18.
For what it's worth, in the last year Go has dropped to #13 on the list — overtaken by assembly language, R, and Groovy.

And Swift dropped from #10 to #15, also being overtaken in the last year by Ruby.

From today's "This Week in Programming" column: Rejoice, long at last, all you Gophers, for the question of whether or not the Go programming language will adopt generics has finally, after many years of debate, been answered this week with the acceptance of a proposal made last month.

In this most recent proposal, Golang team member Ian Lance Taylor writes that generics have been "one of the most commonly requested language features" since the language was first released in 2009, but even then, it's adoption doesn't come without concerns. Taylor explains the idea of generics in the intro of his proposal:

"Generics can give us powerful building blocks that let us share code and build programs more easily. Generic programming means writing functions and data structures where some types are left to be specified later. For example, you can write a function that operates on a slice of some arbitrary data type, where the actual data type is only specified when the function is called. Or, you can define a data structure that stores values of any type, where the actual type to be stored is specified when you create an instance of the data structure."

It is precisely this value proposition — being able to write reusable code — that excites some developers and has been behind the push all along...

Generics wasn't the only controversial programming language addition this week, with the Python Steering Council making the decision to accept a number of Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) collectively known as the Pattern Matching PEPs. "We acknowledge that Pattern Matching is an extensive change to Python and that reaching consensus across the entire community is close to impossible," the council writes, saying that, nonetheless, they "are confident that Pattern Matching as specified in PEP 634, et al, will be a great addition to the Python language."

One dissenter to the addition found their way to the pages of iProgrammer, with the snarky headline "Python Adopts Pattern Matching — Kitchen Sink Next."
In other news, Google increased its support for the Python Software Foundation with a donation of more than $350,000 to support three specific projects, and also says it will continue its donation of Google Cloud infrastructure to the foundation.

It's been estimated that there are 24 million developers in the world. 14 million of them now use Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code) as their IDE, reports ZDNet, with five million new users arriving in 2020.

Julia Liuson, corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division, tells them why: "The strategy for VS Code is really to support our any, any, any strategy. You can be a developer working with any programming language, working on any operating system and develop any kind of software." VS Code runs on macOS, Windows 10, and multiple distributions of Linux, it supports Arm64 on Linux, and runs on Raspberry Pi and Chromebooks. It's also available in preview form
Part of VS Code's popularity is the breadth of language extensions for C++, C#, Python and various Python libraries for data scientists, Java, and JavaScript/Typescript... "We have almost two million Python developers using VS Code and well over a million C++ developers using VS Code," said Liuson. "And even our Java usage is approaching one million...."

Liuson also talked about Microsoft's inner source approach to software development. The company doubled down on inner source in 2019, and recently highlighted its inner-source approach as a factor that mitigated the threat of the SolarWinds hackers accessing its source code. Microsoft didn't make up the term inner source and the approach means taking open-source development practices and applying them inside a single organization. GitHub and GitHub's Enterprise Server fits snuggly with this approach to help organizations collaborate but do so in private.

"Inner source means if you have private IP, but you're inviting other teams within the company to collaborate with you. That's the fundamental difference between open source and inner source. Today, it's very common in large enterprise..."

Visual Studio Magazine reports: Microsoft, which calls its Excel spreadsheet a programming language, reports that an effort called LAMBDA to make it even more of a programming language is paying off, recently being deemed Turing complete. Being Turing complete is the litmus test of a full-fledged programming language, marking the ability to imitate a Turing machine. According to one definition, that means, "A programming language is Turing complete if you can implement any possible algorithm with it."

And that's exactly what LAMBDA can now do. "You can now, in principle, write any computation in the Excel formula language," said Microsoft researchers in a Jan. 25 blog post.

To get there, researchers at the Calc Intelligence project addressed two shortcomings to the LAMBDA project, which is conducted in coordination with the Excel team and which was first announced early last month. They are:

- The Excel formula language supported only scalar values like numbers, strings and Booleans

- It didn't let users define new functions....

"Moreover, even if it takes greater skill and knowledge to author a lambda, it takes no extra skill to call it," researchers said. "LAMBDA allows skilled authors to extend Excel with application-domain-specific functions that appear seamlessly part of Excel to their colleagues, who simply call them.

"It will be interesting to see how users continue to experiment with and apply not only LAMBDA but also data types and dynamic arrays. We believe these new functional programming features will transform how people make decisions with Excel."

And there is certainly a large audience of both programmers and coders, as Microsoft claims "Excel formulas are written by an order of magnitude more users than all the C, C++, C#, Java, and Python programmers in the world combined."
Towards the end the article points out that right now to actually use the new feature, "you have to be a member of the Insiders: Beta program."

Camel Pilot writes: Pyston 2.1, a closed-source but faster and highly-compatible implementation of the Python programming language, significantly outperforms Python 3 in a variety of benchmarks. All the system details and benchmarks in full can be found over on OpenBenchmarking.org.

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."