Dart is a new web programming language developed by Google. It is set to be first unveiled at the GOTO conference, which is held between October 10-12, 2011. The primary intent of Dart is to replace JavaScript. The primary goals of Dart are to solve some of JavaScript’s problems while providing increased performance and security.

• Official Website for Dart – dartlang.org
• Dart – Getting Started (dartlang.org)
• Google Dart to “ultimately … replace JavaScript” (2ality.com)

This is absolutely one of the most amazing timelapse videos I have ever seen!

Most programmers know the typical set of languages, such as C, C++, PHP, Java, etc. These are mainstream languages and used by many. However, there are hundreds or thousands of languages out there; some of which are extremely interesting and sometimes experimental in nature. Here is a quick list of some interesting languages to check out.

• Haskell
• Erlang
• Io
• PLT Scheme
• Clojure
• Squeak
• OCaml
• Factor
• Lua
• Scala
• Epilogue

To see the entire list along with some useful links and good descriptions check out the article:
10 Programming Languages Worth Checking Out (h3rald.com)

As of yesterday, Microsoft has posted a preview version of the new Windows 8 operating system. Windows 8 will come with the new Metro interface (similar to Windows Phone 7) and many other enhancements which are focused on touch-gesture input. One important thing to know is that I’ve heard that many users have been able to get it running in both VMWare and VirtualBox. So you don’t need to have a fresh partition on your hard drive to simply try it out. Here is a small blurb from the download page:

“The Windows Developer Preview is a pre-beta version of Windows 8 for developers. These downloads include prerelease software that may change without notice. The software is provided as is, and you bear the risk of using it. It may not be stable, operate correctly or work the way the final version of the software will. It should not be used in a production environment. The features and functionality in the prerelease software may not appear in the final version. Some product features and functionality may require advanced or additional hardware, or installation of other software.”

Download it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516

source: Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (blog.fogus.me)

1. Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages  by Christopher Strachey
2. Why Functional Programming Matters  by John Hughes
3. An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming  by C. A. R. HOARE
4. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System  by Leslie Lamport (1978)
5. On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism  by Luca Cardelli and Peter Wegner
6. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I  by John McCarthy
7. Predicate Dispatch: A Unified Theory of Dispatch  by Michael Ernst, Craig Kaplan, and Craig Chambers
8. Equal Rights for Functional Objects or, The More Things Change, The More They Are the Same  by Henry G. Baker
9. Organizing Programs Without Classes  by David Ungar, Craig Chambers, Bay-wei Chang, and Urs Hölzle
10. Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store6  by Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall and Werner Vogels
11. Out of the Tar Pit  by Ben Moseley and Peter Marks

I’ve just officially released my first Android application! It is an extremely simple, no-frills deals widget. The Newest Deal lite displays the latest deal in a home screen widget. This app has mainly served as a learning tool to get my hands wet with Android development.However, I do plan on releasing a full non-lite version in the near future with many additional features and the ability to customize the widget.

For more information check out the project page: The Newest Deal lite.

You can also visit the Android Market page for The Newest Deal lite here:

Although this article appears to be specific for Computer Science majors, much of it overlaps with software engineering. It outlines some extremely useful and interesting things that all Computer Science/Software Engineering majors should know. The four main questions that this article answers are:

• What should every student know to get a good job?
• What should every student know to maintain lifelong employment?
• What should every student know to enter graduate school?
• What should every student know to benefit society?

Some of the suggestions mention things such as embracing the Unix philosophy, having a portfolio as a resume, having systems administration knowledge, knowing data structures and algorithms, and many other important things.

View the full article here:
What every computer science major should know (matt.might.net)

Today marks the start of development on my first “official” Android application. I plan to release it to the Android Market once its ready to go. The app is called UpDog and it is intended to be a simple status sharing application. With UpDog you can find out what your friends are up to as well as share your own status. It is intended to be a very simple (and free!) application/service. UpDog will serve as more of a learning experience for development on the Android platform. I’ll be announcing more information and details in the near future as development progresses!

tldr What’s UpDog?

The official project page is here: shwuzzle.com/projects/UpDogApp

The following quoted text is an excerpt from the article “Awesome but often unknown Linux commands and tools (anchor.com.au)” which I found really useful! There are quite a few lesser-known Linux/Unix commands that can prove to be extremely useful. This quoted text outlines just a few of these, but there are many more out there…

“1. pgrep and pkill – The first command ‘pgrep’ will return the process id based on a name or other attributes. pkill will signal a process with a matching name or attribute. Want to kill all processes being run by a given user? Issue a pkill -U USERNAME; sure beats the hell out of:

5. iptraf – Want to know where all your network traffic is going to and coming from? iptraf is a really cool tool which can be used to track this information and let you know what is happening on your server. ”

“The best candidate I have been able to come up with is the C/Unix/Posix use of NUL-terminated text strings. The choice was really simple: Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end? This is a decision that the dynamic trio of Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Brian Kernighan must have made one day in the early 1970s, and they had full freedom to choose either way. I have not found any record of the decision, which I admit is a weak point in its candidacy: I do not have proof that it was a conscious decision.

As far as I can determine from my research, however, the address + length format was preferred by the majority of programming languages at the time, whereas the address + magic_marker format was used mostly in assembly programs. As the C language was a development from assembly to a portable high-level language, I have a hard time believing that Ken, Dennis, and Brian gave it no thought at all.

Using an address + length format would cost one more byte of overhead than an address + magic_marker format, and their PDP computer had limited core memory. In other words, this could have been a perfectly typical and rational IT or CS decision, like the many similar decisions we all make every day; but this one had quite atypical economic consequences.”

The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake (queue.acm.org)