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.

YouTube outlined a string of new features coming to the internet's biggest video platform, including enhancements to YouTube TV and the rollout next month in the U.S. of YouTube Shorts -- its tool for creating short-form vertical videos a la TikTok. From a report: YouTube TV, Google's pay-TV service, will introduce an add-on option that will let subscribers watch shows in 4K, stream programming to an unlimited number of devices at home, and download content for offline viewing. Other features on YouTube's roadmap include the expansion of a new ecommerce feature to let viewers buy products directly from creators' channels; a way to let fans purchase "applause" for their favorite channels; automatically adding video chapters to relevant videos that don't have creator-uploaded chapters; and more personalized mixes on YouTube Music.

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.

When Dave McKay first used computers, punched paper tape was in vogue, "and he has been programming ever since," according to his biography page at How-To Geek. It adds that "His use of computers pre-dates the birth of the PC and the public release of Unix."

Now long-time Slashdot reader sbinning shares McKay's "short history of UNIX and how Linux got its start," which ultimately asks if commercial Unix was killed by Linux: Unix is still out there, running mission-critical systems that are functioning correctly, and operating stably. That'll continue until the support for the applications, operating systems or hardware platform ceases. If something's genuinely mission-critical and it's working, you leave it working. I suspect someone, somewhere, will always be running a commercial UNIX or Unix-like operating system.

But for new installs? There are enough variations of Linux to make the case to go for a commercial Unix very, very difficult.

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.

Rust -- the programming language, not the survival game -- now has a new home: the Rust Foundation. From a report: AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla banded together to launch this new foundation today and put a two-year commitment to a million-dollar budget behind it. This budget will allow the project to "develop services, programs, and events that will support the Rust project maintainers in building the best possible Rust." Rust started as a side project inside of Mozilla to develop an alternative to C/C++. Designed by Mozilla Research's Graydon Hore, with contributions from the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, Rust became the core language for some of the fundamental features of the Firefox browser and its Gecko engine, as well as Mozilla's Servo engine. Today, Rust is the most-loved language among developers. But with Mozilla's layoffs in recent months, many on the Rust team lost jobs and the future of the language became unclear without a main sponsor, though the project itself has thousands of contributors and a lot of corporate users, so the language itself wasn't going anywhere.

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..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In China's popular online-streaming industry, virtual gift-giving is big. You can send your favorite live performer anything from a rose for 5 yuan (80 cents) to a space rocket for 500 yuan. The present is just a symbol, but the money is real -- and that's what's made Kuaishou Technology so successful. [...] Co-founders Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao will each be worth more than $5.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Su, a native of China's central Hunan province, studied computer programming at the prestigious Tsinghua University before joining Google in Beijing in 2006. There, he earned about $23,000 annually, eight times the country's average salary back then. While he said he was "extremely happy," a stay in Silicon Valley inspired him to start his own business, according to Kuaishou's biography. The 38-year-old quit Google during the global financial crisis to start his own video-advertising venture, which didn't come to fruition. After a short stint with Baidu Inc., he got acquainted with Cheng in 2011 and they soon decided to pair up. In 2013, the duo transformed the Kuaishou app from a GIF-maker to the social-video platform it is today, initially gaining popularity with its videos of life in rural China.

With the rise of ByteDance's Douyin, the Chinese twin app of TikTok, Kuaishou broadened its appeal, luring influencers backed by talent agencies and pop stars like Taiwan's Jay Chou. Along the way, it sped up monetization by creating ad slots and in-app stores for brands and merchants. While virtual gift purchases are still its bread and butter -- they make up almost two-thirds of its revenue -- the company is delving deeper into higher-margin businesses like e-commerce and online gaming. Its sales rose almost 50% to 40.7 billion yuan in the first nine months of last year, according to the IPO prospectus.

An anonymous Slashdot reader warns of a possible miscalculation: 20 years ago today, cobolreport.com published an article, according to which there are 30 billion Customer Information Control System/COBOL transactions per day. This number has since been cited countless times... [T]his number is still to be found in the marketing of most COBOL service providers, compiler vendors (IBM, Micro-Focus and others) and countless articles about how relevant COBOL supposedly still was. The article originally reported 30 billion "CICS transactions", but within 2 years it had already been turned into "COBOL transactions"...

The "30 billion" likely originates from a DataPro survey in 1997, in which they still reported 20 billion transactions per day. Only 421 companies participated in that survey. They actually scaled the results from such a small survey up to the IT-market of the entire world!

That same survey is also the source of many other numbers that are still to be found in the marketing of COBOL compiler vendors and articles:

- There are 200 billion lines of COBOL Code

- That's 60-80% of all the source codes in the world [sic]

- 5 billion lines of COBOL code are newly written each year

- There are 2 million COBOL developers in the world

- COBOL processes 95% of all "in person transactions", "ATM swipes" or similar

DataPro was bought by Gartner Inc. in 1997. Since then, all the numbers are reported to come "from Gartner". Only very early sources quote DataPro as their source.

Some of these numbers are obvious nonsense. The explanation for this is that DataPro had only surveyed mainframe owners. So it only says that 60-80% of all the source codes on mainframes are written in COBOL (which is plausible at least for 1997). And only 95% of all credit companies that have mainframes use their mainframes for processing credit card transactions. Considering the low participation, we are probably talking about 19 of 20 credit companies here.

"The domain name perl.com was stolen and now points to an IP address associated with malware campaigns," reports Bleeping Computer: Perl.com is a site owned by Tom Christiansen and has been used since 1997 to post news and articles about the Perl programming language. On January 27th, Perl programming author and Perl.com editor brian d foy tweeted that the perl.com domain was suddenly registered under another person. Intellectual property lawyer John Berryhill later replied to the tweet that the domain was stolen in September 2020 while at Network Solutions, transferred to a registrar in China on Christmas Day, and finally moved to the Key-Systems registrar on January 27th, 2020.

It wasn't until the last transfer that the IP addresses assigned to the domain were changed from 151.101.2.132 to the Google Cloud IP address 35.186.238[.]101...

On the 28th, d foy tweeted that they have set up perl.com temporarily at http://perldotcom.perl.org for users who wish to access the site until the domain is recovered...

d foy has told BleepingComputer that it is not believed that the domain owner's account was hacked and that they are currently working with Network solutions and Key-Systems to resolve the issue. "I do know from direct communication with the Network Solutions and Key Systems that they are working on this and that the perl.com domain is locked. Tom Christiansen, the rightful owner, is going through the recovery process with those registrars."

"Both registrars, along with a few others, reached out to me personally to offer help and guidance. We are confident that we will be able to recover the domain, but I do not have a timetable for that," d foy told BleepingComputer.

The IP address that perl.com is now hosted has a long history of being used in older malware campaigns and more recent ones.
"Anyone using a perl.com host for their CPAN mirror should use www.cpan.org instead," advises an announcement page today at Perl.org, which d foy tweeted "is now going to be the source for the latest http://Perl.com info."

On Thursday d foy tweeted that "There's no news on the recovery progress. Everyone who needs to be talking is talking to each other and it's just a process now."

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.

"A two-episode series which debuted on Chinese streaming platforms last week has been described as the first reality competition to focus on programmers," reports the I Programmer web site: The show, sponsored by the Ant Group, an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group, is called Ranshaoba tiancaichengxuyuan, which roughly translates to "Burn Bright! Genius Programmer," and followed four teams engaged on a challenge akin to the hackathons that take place on Kaggle and similar platforms.

News of the show comes in a report China's first variety show about computer programmers seeks to mold Chinese IT idols in Global Times, the English-language newspaper published by People's Daily, which is the official newspaper of Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Ji Yuqiao reported that twenty programmers took part in the show and were divided into four teams that competed to win a prize of 1 million yuan ($154,152). Some of the competitors were graduates of top universities such as Tsinghua University in China and Carnegie Mellon University in the US, while others were high school dropouts. Four professors at Peking University and Tsinghua University acted as mentors to these young talents on the show.

Contestants were tasked with protecting wild animals from poachers in a virtual world. With a time limit of 48 hours they had to design algorithms to detect and identify wild animals based on the limited data resources in the game.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: A new web quiz challenge visitors, "Can you tell a coder from a cannibal? A mathematician from a murderer? Try to spot who liked hacking away at corpses rather than computers."
One commenter on BoingBoing says the quiz brought back memories of doing IT recruitment in the 1990s. "After a few months at that job, I started to wonder if spending so much time staring at soulless equipment wasn't affecting people. Too many candidates were completely humorless, culturally clueless, or sporting a thousand-yard stare..."

ZDNet takes a look at a new nonprofit group called the Organization for Ethical Source (OES): The OES is devoted to the idea that the free software and open-source concept of "Freedom Zero" are outdated. Freedom Zero is "the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose." It's fundamental to how open-source software is made and used... They hate the notion that open-source software can be used for any purpose including "evil" purposes. The group states:

The world has changed since the Open Source Definition was created — open source has become ubiquitous, and is now being leveraged by bad actors for mass surveillance, racist policing, and other human rights abuses all over the world. The OES believes that the open-source community must evolve to address the magnitude and complexity of today's social, political, and technological challenges...

How does this actually work in a license...?

The Software shall not be used by any person or entity for any systems, activities, or other uses that violate any Human Rights Laws. "Human Rights Laws" means any applicable laws, regulations, or rules (collectively, "Laws") that protect human, civil, labor, privacy, political, environmental, security, economic, due process, or similar rights....

This latest version of the license was developed in collaboration with a pro-bono legal team from Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL). It has been adopted by many open-source projects including the Ruby library VCR; mobile app development tool Gryphon; Javascript mapping library react-leaflet; and WeTransfer's entire open-source portfolio...

The organization adds, though, the license's most significant impact may be the debate it sparked between ethical-minded developers and open-source traditionalists around the primacy of Freedom Zero.
The article includes this quote from someone described as an open source-savvy lawyer.

"To me, ethical licensing is a case of someone with a very small hammer seeing every problem as a nail, and not even acknowledging that the nail is far too big for the hammer."

Inside.com's developer newsletter spotted this code repository story: GitHub posted a DMCA notice it received from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) last week asking the platform to take down a repository associated with NYAA.si, a popular torrent site specializing in anime content. The DMCA captured attention as the code doesn't belong to the MPA. Rather, the MPA argues the code is used for the development of the site, which allows for copyright infringement, while the repo also makes it possible to create NYAA clones.

The news comes a few months after GitHub restored the youtube-dl repository and created a $1m legal defense fund to help open source developers fight unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims. At the same time, the platform also announced it will be improving its Section 1201 claim review process to make it harder to take down repos.
But the next day, the newsletter reported GitHub had reversed the takedown: The company explains the notice didn't meet its DMCA Takedown Policy requirements as it failed to "establish that the code is preconfigured to infringe." GitHub adds that it also restored any content that was disabled because of the notice.
Some context from TorrentFreak: This isn't the first time the MPA has gone after the anime torrent site. Last November we reported that the anti-piracy group sent cease and desist letters to several people who are allegedly connected to the site, describing it as an "Anime Cartel".
TorrentFreak's latest update: A few weeks ago, the Motion Picture Association tried to shut the project down by going after several people who are allegedly linked to the site. Framing NYAA as an "Anime Cartel", the movie group demanded a total shutdown and tens of thousands of dollars in settlements...

This takedown request initially succeeded as GitHub disabled the repository earlier this week. Before doing so, the platform reached out to the developers and gave them the option to respond or make changes, but that request went unanswered. Without a response from the developers, this is usually where things end. In this case, however, GitHub decided to carry out another review after the project was taken down, perhaps in part motivated by the news coverage. "While we didn't hear back from the maintainers, we chose to do another review ourselves to proactively see how we could resolve the issue," a GitHub spokesperson informs TorrentFreak...

[A]t the time of writing the NYAA repository is up and running again. The MPA still has the option to provide additional information about the allegedly-infringing nature of the code, which would then trigger another review.

GitHub stresses that it's their purpose to make sure that developers can host code within the boundaries of the law. Unless the entire repository is infringing, it's standard policy to allow developers to respond to DMCA claims before any content is removed.

We have learned that Brad Cox, computer scientist known mostly for creating the Objective-C programming language with his business partner Tom Love, died on January 2, 2021 at his residence. He was 76. From a Legacy.com post: Brad was born on May 2, 1944 in Fort Benning, Georgia, to the late Nancy Hinson Cox and Dewey McBride Cox of Lake City, South Carolina. Brad grew up on the family's dairy farm in South Carolina but found himself most interested in science. After graduating from Lake City High School, he received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Organic Chemistry and Mathematics from Furman University, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago, and worked on an early form of neural networks. He soon found himself more interested in computers and got a job at International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) and later joined Schlumbeger -- Doll Research Labs, and ultimately formed his own Connecticut startup, Productivity Products International (PPI) later named Stepstone.

Among his first known software projects, he wrote a PDP-8 program for simulating clusters of neurons. He worked at the National Institutes of Health and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute before moving into the software profession. Dr. Cox was an entrepreneur, having founded the Stepstone Company together with Tom Love for releasing the first Objective-C implementation. Stepstone hoped to sell "ICPaks" and Dr. Cox focused on building his ICPak libraries and hired a team to continue work on Objective-C, including Steve Naroff. The late Steve Jobs', NeXT, licensed the Objective-C language for it's new operating system, NEXTSTEP. NeXT eventually acquired Objective- C from Stepstone. Objective-C continued to be the primary programming language for writing software for Apple's OS X and iOS.

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

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

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

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

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