Developers love Python and TypeScript, get paid for Clojure, and aren’t using blockchain

Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey was published this week, giving an insight into the skills, experience, and opinions of a wide slice of the developer community. Since its launch in 2008, Stack Overflow has become an essential developer tool, offering copy/paste solutions to an ever-growing number of programming problems.

The Stack Overflow survey is particularly interesting, as Stack Overflow does not focus on any one kind of developer or development; is used by professionals, students, and hobbyists alike; and has substantial use across Europe, North America, and Asia, with respectable representation from South America, Africa, and Oceania. As such, it gives a view of the software development industry as a whole, across all fields and disciplines.

To the surprise of nobody, Web technology remains top of the usage chart: some 67.8 percent of developers use JavaScript, giving it the number one position; and 63.5 percent use HTML and CSS in second place. SQL once again takes the third slot, at 54.4 percent. The first change relative to last year’s survey comes at the fourth spot, with Python pushing Java into fifth place and Bash/shell scripting into sixth. C#, PHP, and C++ retain their same relative ordering at the seventh, eighth, and ninth slots.

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Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

Enlarge / Attendees working on Apple Inc. laptop computers participate in the TechCrunch Disrupt London 2015 Hackathon. (credit: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Almost every aspect of our daily lives is now shaped in some way by computer code. Yet the average person on the street has no idea how this all works or just how much influence developers now quietly wield in society. Tech journalist Clive Thompson is on a mission to change that with his new book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.

Before he was a tech journalist, Thompson was a high school hacker who taught himself to code on early personal computers like the Commodore 64. His prior book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, pushed back against the doomsayers convinced that new technological tools are rotting our brains, arguing that such things actually boost our cognitive abilities. With Coders, “I wanted to give the average person a glimpse into who coders are, why they have the priorities they have, what their passions are, what their blind spots are,” he said. “So that the average person can understand a little bit more the warp and woof of this digital world that coders have created for us.”

Ars: You ended up becoming a writer rather than a professional coder. In many respects, coding is just another kind of language, yet many writers find it intimidating. Do you find the two to be similar?

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Windows 10 October 2018 Update still not released, running out of October

Enlarge / Who doesn’t love some new Windows? (credit: Peter Bright / Flickr)

Microsoft is making yet more fixes to Windows 10 build 17763, the build that has been blessed as the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.

The update was initially published on the second Tuesday of the month, but within a few days Microsoft had to pull the update due to a bug that could cause data loss. It turned out that the bug had been reported numerous times during the preview period, but for whatever reason Microsoft had overlooked or ignored the feedback items describing the problem.

Microsoft fixed that particular bug and sent the fixed build to Windows Insiders to test. The fixes published today include a fix for another widely reported (but apparently ignored) bug when dragging files from .ZIP archives in Explorer. If a file within the archive has the same name as a file in the destination directory, Explorer is supposed to show a prompt to ask whether to overwrite the existing file or rename the new one. For some reason, Windows build 17763 was not asking the question. Instead, it was skipping the extraction of the file with the conflicting name.

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The full Photoshop CC is coming to the iPad in 2019

Adobe is bringing Photoshop CC to the iPad. Set for release next year, Photoshop CC for iPad will bring the full Photoshop engine to Apple’s line of tablets.

Photoshop for iPad has a user interface structured similarly to the desktop application. It is immediately familiar to users of the application but tuned for touch screens, with larger targets and adaptations for the tablet as well as gestures to streamline workflows. Both touch and pencil input are supported. The interface is somewhat simpler than the desktop version, and although the same Photoshop code is running under the hood to ensure there’s no loss of fidelity, not every feature will be available in the mobile version. The first release will contain the main tools while Adobe plans to add more in the future.

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Google backtracks—a bit—on controversial Chrome sign-in feature

Enlarge (credit: Google Chrome)

Google will partially revert a controversial change made in Chrome 69 that unified signing in to Google’s online properties and Chrome itself and which further preserved Google’s cookies even when users chose to clear all cookies. Chrome 70, due in mid-October, will retain the unified signing in by default, but it will allow those who want to opt out to do so.

Chrome has long had the ability to sign in with a Google account. Doing this offers a number of useful features; most significantly, signed-in users can enable syncing of their browser data between devices, so tabs open on one machine can be listed and opened on another, passwords saved in the browser can be retrieved online, and so on. This signing in uses a regular Google account, the same as would be used to sign in to Gmail or the Google search engine.

Prior to Chrome 69, signing in to the browser was independent of signing in to a Google online property. You could be signed in to Gmail, for example, but signed out of the browser to ensure that your browsing data never gets synced and stored in the cloud. Chrome 69 unified the two: signing in to Google on the Web would automatically sign you in to the browser, using the same account. Similarly, signing out of a Google property on the Web would sign you out of the browser.

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Microsoft pulls Windows Sets “tabbed windows” feature from next release

Windows Sets.

First previewed last November, Sets, a new Windows interface feature that will make every window into a tabbed windows, has been removed from the latest Insider Preview build of Windows 10. Moreover, the Verge is reporting that the feature won’t be coming back in this year’s next major update, due in October.

This marks the second time that Sets have been included in a preview release, only to be removed at a later stage prior to the release of an update. When first announcing Sets, Microsoft was very careful to note that it wasn’t promising Sets for any particular release—or possibly even ever, given the complexities of application compatibility and uncertainty about how people will actually use the feature.

The promise of Sets is certainly high. Putting tabs in every window is a way of solving certain long-standing requests such as the demand for tabs in Explorer, but Sets went far beyond this, allowing sets of different applications to be grouped together with tabs to switch them. As such, they became a way of managing one’s workspace, allowing you to combine, say, a Word window with a school paper with the online resources that you’re using to write the paper.

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YouTube Music will replace Google Play Music but won’t kill user uploads

Enlarge / The home screen of the revamped YouTube Music app, running on an iPad. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Google has confirmed that its revamped YouTube Music streaming service will eventually support key features of its Google Play Music app, including the ability for users to upload music files that may not exist in the service’s streaming catalog.

Google announced an overhaul for YouTube Music last week alongside a price bump for its YouTube Red service. It then began a “soft” rollout of the app for select users on Tuesday.

But the announcement of a revamped YouTube Music app has caused some confusion among those who subscribe to Google Play Music, a streaming music service Google launched in 2011 but has struggled to attract subscribers on the level of category leaders Spotify and Apple Music.

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Developers love trendy new languages, but earn more with functional programming

(credit: Stack Exchange)

Developer Q&A site Stack Overflow performs an annual survey to find out more about the programmer community, and the latest set of results has just been published.

JavaScript remains the most widely used programming language among professional developers, making that six years at the top for the lingua franca of Web development. Other Web tech including HTML (#2 in the ranking), CSS (#3), and PHP (#9). Business-oriented languages were also in wide use, with SQL at #4, Java at #5, and C# at #8. Shell scripting made a surprising showing at #6 (having not shown up at all in past years, which suggests that the questions have changed year-to-year), Python appeared at #7, and systems programming stalwart C++ rounded out the top 10.

These aren’t, however, the languages that developers necessarily want to use. Only three languages from the most-used top ten were in the most-loved list; Python (#3), JavaScript (#7), and C# (#8). For the third year running, that list was topped by Rust, the new systems programming language developed by Mozilla. Second on the list was Kotlin, which wasn’t even in the top 20 last year. This new interest is likely due to Google’s decision last year to bless the language as an official development language for Android. TypeScript, Microsoft’s better JavaScript than JavaScript comes in at fourth, with Google’s Go language coming in at fifth. Smalltalk, last year’s second-most loved, is nowhere to be seen this time around.

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The interface to send out a missile alert in Hawaii is, as expected, quite bad

Enlarge / A morning view of the city of Honolulu, Hawaii is seen on January 13, 2018.
Social media ignited on January 13, 2018 after apparent screenshots of cell phone emergency alerts warning of a “ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii” began circulating, which US officials quickly dismissed as “false.”
(Eugene Tanner/AFP/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

The Honolulu Civil Beat claims to have obtained a picture of the interface used to send out tests and missile alerts to the people of Hawaii, and it’s not pretty.

It appears the employee who sent out the mobile and broadcast missile alert that sent Hawaii into a panic for 38 minutes on Saturday was supposed to choose “DRILL – PACOM (CDW) – STATE ONLY” but instead chose “PACOM (CDW) – STATE ONLY” from an unordered list of equally unintuitive and difficult-to-read options.

This is the screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday. The operator clicked the PACOM (CDW) State Only link. The drill link is the one that was supposed to be clicked. #Hawaii pic.twitter.com/lDVnqUmyHa

— Honolulu Civil Beat (@CivilBeat) January 16, 2018

The Honolulu Civil Beat noted in a story on Sunday that the employee who made the choice from the nearly unintelligible list has been temporarily reassigned within the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA), and his status at the agency will be decided after a review. The news outlet wrote that according to Emergency Management Agency Administrator Vern Miyagi, the employee “felt terrible about the mistake.”

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Alienware revamps its Command Center app with a centralized game hub

Enlarge / The revamped Alienware Command Center’s home screen, with its game library on the right. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Another quick update out of CES: Gaming PC maker Alienware is refreshing the Command Center software that comes paired with its line of notebooks and desktops. The overhauled settings app will first arrive in February on a slightly updated version of the company’s Area 51 desktop, which loses a front USB port, adds a couple more fans and U.2 SSD support, and supports a wider breadth of LED colors on its chassis. The software will then come pre-installed on new Alienware devices going forward. Unfortunately, it won’t be available for the Dell subsidiary’s existing machines.

Ars at CES 2018

• Dell’s XPS 15 gets the 2-in-1 treatment, plus Radeon RX Vega graphics
• August Access will unlock your doors for in-home deliveries
• Google Assistant “Smart Displays” are here: It’s an Echo Show, but Googley
• The best laptop of last year adds HDR, facial recognition, and 8th-gen processors
• Lenovo’s new Google Assistant smart display can play YouTube videos

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This is a mostly visual revamp, with a cleaner, more spaced out, more graphics-heavy look. You can still use the app to monitor and adjust your hardware’s fan speeds and heat output, create overclock profiles, change the lighting effects on your system itself, and create preset profiles for separate games. But that colorization can now be adjusted with more granularity, the overclocking tool lets you manage and test the effect with a few newbie-friendly sliders, and it all appears a bit easier to grok at first blush.

Beyond that, Alienware has now baked a game library and launcher tool into the app’s home screen. The company says the tool will pull in titles downloaded from any source (Steam, GOG, Origin, etc.), the idea being to create a sort of centralized hub for all of your games. Dell says the Command Center will be removable, but the company cautions that it will be the only app that can control lighting and overclocking on Dell devices.

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