This month’s edition of the TIOBE Index, which ranks the popularity of various programming languages, has a surprise: Microsoft’s Visual Basic .NET has climbed into fifth place, its highest ever. Meanwhile, Visual Basic .NET’s predecessor, “classic” Visual Basic, still lingers in nineteenth place on TIOBE’s list. “Professional software developers don’t think much of Visual Basic,”… Read More »
Is Donald Trump good for tech? According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), tech unemployment has reached record lows with Trump in the Oval Office. We dove all the way back to the year 2000, analyzing tech unemployment (“Computer and Mathematical Occupations,” specifically) each quarter. Under Trump (specifically the first quarter of… Read More »
Yet again, Glassdoor has issued its annual list of the best places to work, and yet again, a handful of tech companies made the upper echelons of the list. However, there’s one big change from last year: Facebook, which previously placed first, is now in seventh place, just behind Linkedin (in sixth place) and ahead… Read More »
GitHub has released its latest Octoverse report, an extensive scan of its 96 million repositories and 200+ million pull requests, and found some interesting bits of data about the tech world’s fastest-growing programming languages. “We’re seeing trends toward more statically typed languages focused on thread safety and interoperability,” Github’s report added. “Kotlin, TypeScript, and Rust… Read More »
Recently, users discovered a popular open-source JavaScript library executing malicious code to steal cryptocurrency data. A response from the library’s founder and maintainer about the hack surfaces a topic of discussion: Should open-source maintainers be paid? GitHub user dominictarr launched the repo in question, Event-Stream, as a “fun” side project: “I created it for fun.… Read More »
The term “computer programmer” is rather broad. These days, what’s a “computer”? The phone in your pocket owns that term just as much as the laptop on your desk; does that mean “mobile developer” is synonymous with “computer programmer”? With the advent of easy-to-use programming tools, virtually anyone within a typical organization can bang together… Read More »
Apple finally deleted the physical Home button from the iPad Pro. It was a move long predicted by the various factions of tech punditry: once Apple chucked the Home button from the iPhone in favor of an all-screen front, it was only a matter of time until it did the same thing to the iPad.… Read More »
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is requiring employers that apply for H-1B visas to name any companies where their H-1B workers might end up on a contract basis. This could have significant consequences for outsourcing and staffing firms that apply for large numbers of H-1B visas, then send those workers to other firms. Outsourcing… Read More »
Virtual reality (VR) could prove a world-changing technology. There’s just one little problem: with a VR headset strapped to your face, immersing you in a virtual world, you have a lot of trouble judging your real-world position. Nothing will break the illusion of VR like accidentally breaking your toe against a cabinet, or tripping over… Read More »
When Apple introduced macOS Mojave at WWDC 2018, it also launched four ‘Marzipan’ apps: News, Voice Memos, Home, and Stocks. They’re iPad apps for the desktop, but Apple missed its most important opportunity in Swift Playgrounds. Let’s first rewind to WWDC, when we said this about Apple’s new cross-platform apps: Apple didn’t say as much,… Read More »