The TIOBE index of programming language popularity celebrates 20 years of continuous publishing this month. Started as a hobbyist project back in 2001, the site estimates each programming language's popularity by counting search engine results for the phrase <language> programming (indirectly counting each listing for developers, courses, and third-party vendors).

When it was started 20 years ago, the top languages were Java, C, and C++.

20 years later, the top languages are now C, Java, Python, and C++

And "The difference between position 1 and position 3 is only 0.67%." This means that the next few months will be exciting. What language is going to win this battle? Python seems to have the best chances to become number 1, thanks to its market leadership in the booming field of data mining and artificial intelligence.
ZDNet also noted the trends: Searches for C were down 4.83 percentage points compared to last July. Java searches were down 3.93% over the period, while Python gained 1.86%.

The top 10 languages behind C, Java and Python are C++, C#, Visual Basic, Javascript, PHP, Assembly Language, and SQL.
But they also have this to say about TIOBE's calculations: It's a different methodology to developer analyst RedMonk, which looks at language usage on software projects hosted on GitHub and discussions on the developer Q&A site, Stack Overflow.

RedMonk's Q1 2021 rankings place JavaScript in top place, followed by Python and Java.

Other interesting moves this month:

• C++ gained more than 0.5% getting closer to the top 3
• Rust rose from #30 to #27
• Go rose from #20 to #13
• TypeScript rose from #45 to #37
• Haskellrose rose from #49 to #39

Reactions are starting to come in for GitHub's new Copilot coding tool, which one site calls "a product of the partnership between Microsoft and AI research and deployment company OpenAI — which Microsoft invested $1 billion into two years ago." According to the tech preview page: GitHub Copilot is currently only available as a Visual Studio Code extension. It works wherever Visual Studio Code works — on your machine or in the cloud on GitHub Codespaces. And it's fast enough to use as you type. "Copilot looks like a potentially fantastic learning tool — for developers of all abilities," said James Governor, an analyst at RedMonk. "It can remove barriers to entry. It can help with learning new languages, and for folks working on polyglot codebases. It arguably continues GitHub's rich heritage as a world-class learning tool. It's early days but AI-assisted programming is going to be a thing, and where better to start experiencing it than GitHub...?"

The issue of scale is a concern for GitHub, according to the tech preview FAQ: "If the technical preview is successful, our plan is to build a commercial version of GitHub Copilot in the future. We want to use the preview to learn how people use GitHub Copilot and what it takes to operate it at scale." GitHub spent the last year working closely with OpenAI to build Copilot. GitHub developers, along with some users inside Microsoft, have been using it every day internally for months.

[Guillermo Rauch, CEO of developer software provider Vercel, who also is founder of Vercel and creator of Next.js], cited in a tweet a statement from the Copilot tech preview FAQ page, "GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before."

To that, Rauch simply typed: "The future."

Rauch's post is relevant in that one of the knocks against Copilot is that some folks seem to be concerned that it will generate code that is identical to code that has been generated under open source licenses that don't allow derivative works, but which will then be used by a developer unknowingly...
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman has responded to those concerns, according to another article, arguing that training an AI system constitutes fair use: Friedman is not alone — a couple of actual lawyers and experts in intellectual property law took up the issue and, at least in their preliminary analysis, tended to agree with Friedman... [U.K. solicitor] Neil Brown examines the idea from an English law perspective and, while he's not so sure about the idea of "fair use" if the idea is taken outside of the U.S., he points simply to GitHub's terms of service as evidence enough that the company can likely do what it's doing. Brown points to passage D4, which grants GitHub "the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time." "The license is broadly worded, and I'm confident that there is scope for argument, but if it turns out that Github does not require a license for its activities then, in respect of the code hosted on Github, I suspect it could make a reasonable case that the mandatory license grant in its terms covers this as against the uploader," writes Brown. Overall, though, Brown says that he has "more questions than answers."
Armin Ronacher, the creator of the Flask web framework for Python, shared an interesting example on Twitter (which apparently came from the game Quake III Arena) in which Copilot apparently reproduces a chunk of code including not only its original comment ("what the fuck?") but also its original copyright notice.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Two weeks ago, World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee sent an NFT of the web's original source code to the auction block with a starting bid of just $1,000. Yesterday, Sotheby's announced that the crypto asset sold for $5.4 million. The sum makes Berners-Lee's work one of the priciest NFTs of all time. The digital package included not just the source code but also a letter from Berners-Lee reflecting on the creation of the web, some original HTML documents, an SVG "poster" of thousands of lines of code, and a 30-minute visualization of the code being typed on a screen.

But there's a twist. An eagle-eyed researcher pointed out on Twitter that the animation initially posted on the Sotheby's site had errors in the code, possibly introduced when the person making the video fed the Objective-C code through an app or web service to produce the typing effect in the animation. Instead of angle brackets that are present in the code (), the HTML codes for the symbols ( & lt; and & gt;) appeared instead. On the poster, which was made by a Python script created by Berners-Lee, the brackets appear correct. Presumably, they are also correct in the code itself. The code was corrected in later animations, raising questions about this particular NFT and NFTs as a whole.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Kevin Modzelewski and his colleagues at Dropbox set out to create Pyston in 2014, they had a very simple objective: to lower the costs of running Python code on Dropbox's servers, by making the code itself faster. "We were growing exponentially, so our server cost was growing exponentially," Modzelewski tells TechRepublic. "If we could get Python running faster, we would spend less money running Python." The original cost reduction initiative at Dropbox snowballed into a bigger project for Modzelewski when the company moved away from Python in 2017 and cancelled the Pyston project. He had realized while working on the language that there was a strong demand for faster Python among the developer community, and while there were plenty of tools around for improving the performance in smaller applications, there were none designed for big, business logic-type applications such as Dropbox.

"There's a lot of tools out there for helping you run Python faster, but there weren't any that were a good fit for Dropbox's use case," says Modzelewski. "This was an area of the Python market where a lot of money was being spent, but not very many tools were being developed for helping. It was under served." Fast forward to today and Pyston is now in version 2.2, and has been open-sourced, with Modzelewski and fellow developer Marius Wachtler now leading the project as co-founders. The latest implementation promises a 30% performance improvement over Python 3.8.8, with a key benefit being that developers can simply drop their Python applications into Pyston and get going, without having to rewrite their code. It's also a "completely separate thing" to what Modzelewski and fellow developers built for Dropbox some seven years ago.

Tim Berners-Lee has defended his decision to auction an NFT (non-fungible token) representing the source code to the web, comparing the sale to an autographed book or a speaking tour. From a report: The creator of the world wide web announced his decision to create and sell the digital asset through Sotheby's auction house last week. In the auction, which begins on Wednesday and will run for one week, collectors will have the chance to bid on a bundle of items, including the 10,000 lines of the source code to the original web browser, a digital poster created by Berners-Lee representing the code, a letter from him, and an animated video showing the code being entered.

"This is totally aligned with the values of the web," Berners-Lee told the Guardian. "The questions I've got, they said: 'Oh, that doesn't sound like the free and open web.' Well, wait a minute, the web is just as free and just as open as it always was. The core codes and protocols on the web are royalty free, just as they always have been. I'm not selling the web -- you won't have to start paying money to follow links. "I'm not even selling the source code. I'm selling a picture that I made, with a Python programme that I wrote myself, of what the source code would look like if it was stuck on the wall and signed by me. "If they felt that me selling an NFT of a poster is inappropriate, then what about me selling a book? I do things like that, which involve money, but the free and open web is still free and open. And we do still, every now and again, have to fight to keep it free and open, fight for net neutrality and so on."

Freenode's Linux support channel has an official web page at freenode.linux.community, which now bears this announcement:

22+ year old ##linux on freenode has been seized by freenode staff

The community's (multi-platform) site reminds visitors of the alternative channels #linux on Libera and Linux.Chat on Discord.

But they're not the only ones making changes. "[T]he FSF and GNU have decided to relocate our IRC channels to Libera.Chat," reads an official announcement on the FSF blog. "Effective immediately, Libera is the official home of our channels, which include but are not limited to all those in the #fsf, #gnu, and #libreplanet namespaces." As we have had nearly twenty years of positive experiences with the Freenode staff, most of whom now comprise the staff of the Libera network, we are confident in their technical and interpersonal expertise, as well as their ability to make the network as long-lasting and integral to the free software community as they made Freenode. We look forward to joining the large number of free software and free culture projects who have already made Libera.Chat their home, and hope to stay there for many years to come.
Also making a move: freenode's #Python channel. Software developer Ned Batchelder, one of the channel's operators (and also an architect at edX), shared a recent experience in a new blog post this morning. When they'd decided to move #python to the new Libera.chat network (run by former Freenode staffers), they also stayed in Freenode's channel "to let people know where everyone had gone." Yesterday, after a heated debate in the Freenode channel where I was accused of splitting the community, I got k-lined (banned entirely from Freenode). The reason given was "spamming", because of my recurring message about the move to Libera. Then the entire Freenode #python channel was closed... Was it malice or was it mistake? Does it matter? It's not a good way to run a network. After the channel was closed, people asking staff about what happened were banned from asking. That wasn't a mistake... [T]he new staff seems to be using force to silence people asking questions. It's clear that transparency is not a strong value for them.

Setting aside network drama, the big picture here is that the Freenode #python community isn't split: it's alive and well. It's just not on Freenode anymore, it's on Libera.

Freenode was a good thing. But the domain name of the server was the least important part of it, just a piece of technical trivia. There's no reason to stick with Freenode just because it is called Freenode. As with any way of bringing people together, the important part is the people. If all of the people go someplace else, follow them there, and continue.

See you on Libera.

A multi-platform Python-based malware targeting Windows and Linux devices has now been upgraded to worm its way into Internet-exposed VMware vCenter servers unpatched against a remote code execution vulnerability. BleepingComputer reports: The malware, dubbed FreakOut by CheckPoint researchers in January (aka Necro and N3Cr0m0rPh), is an obfuscated Python script designed to evade detection using a polymorphic engine and a user-mode rootkit that hides malicious files dropped on compromised systems. FreakOut spreads itself by exploiting a wide range of OS and apps vulnerabilities and brute-forcing passwords over SSH, adding the infected devices to an IRC botnet controlled by its masters. The malware's core functionality enables operators to launch DDoS attacks, backdoor infected systems, sniff and exfiltrate network traffic, and deploy XMRig miners to mine for Monero cryptocurrency.

As Cisco Talos researchers shared in a report published today, FreakOut's developers have been hard at work improving the malware's spreading capabilities since early May, when the botnet's activity has suddenly increased. "Although the bot was originally discovered earlier this year, the latest activity shows numerous changes to the bot, ranging from different command and control (C2) communications and the addition of new exploits for spreading, most notably vulnerabilities in VMWare vSphere, SCO OpenServer, Vesta Control Panel and SMB-based exploits that were not present in the earlier iterations of the code," Cisco Talos security researcher Vanja Svajcer said. FreakOut bots scan for new systems to target either by randomly generating network ranges or on its masters' commands sent over IRC via the command-and-control server. For each IP address in the scan list, the bot will try to use one of the built-in exploits or log in using a hardcoded list of SSH credentials.

GameStop has quietly unveiled a new web portal for a non-fungible token (NFT) platform. The Block reports: "We are building a team" the page declares, stating: "We welcome exceptional engineers (solidity, react, python), designers, gamers, marketers, and community leaders. If you want to join our team, send your profile or something you've built to: nfteam@gamestop.com."

The exact scope of the project is unclear, though prominently featured on the page is a link to an Ethereum address, indicating that GameStop's team will use Ethereum as a technology base. The smart contract code declares "Game On Anon" and links to GameStop's NFT page and indicates that potential GameStop-released NFTs will utilize Ethereum's ERC721 standard. The code also points to a dedicated token, GME.

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."