Tetris, the classic and addictive puzzle game where you rotate and position falling blocks, has been played by at least a billion people. It was invented 40 years ago and to mark the occasion the BBC News in Russian website reveals the story of how Tetris crossed the Iron Curtain and discloses how it was finally "won" this year.

Our top featured article this week is the first extract from "Deep C Dives: Adventures in C" the new addition to the I Programmer Library by Mike James which, appropriately, investigates C's void data type. We also has a Programmer's Puzzle - again on data types, classes and structs, but this time in C#. C++ is in trhe news as it rises to the next-to-top position in the TIOBE Index.

Apple's Swift Student Challenge is an annual competition  designed to encourage software coding among young people.This year 50 "Distinguished Winners" were invited to attend WWDC24 where, to their surprise, some got to meet Tim Cook.

A range of free self-paced courses on GenAI, have been released on AWS SkillBuilder, Amazon's online learning center where you can learn from AWS experts to build cloud skills online.

Apple has released details of what developers can expect in Swift 6, due to be released this year. The team says Swift 6 makes it easier to write concurrent code correctly with a new, optional language mode that analyzes your code at compile-time and diagnoses possible data races. 

Pulumi has announced Pulumi Copilot, an AI tool for general cloud infrastructure management. Copilot uses large language models with semantic understanding of the cloud to provide insights and controls over managing cloud infrastructure.

The June 2024 TIOBE Index is out and its headline comes as a bit of a shock: C++ surpasses C for the first time in history. Lower down the ranks both Go and Rust have achieved their highest positions ever at #7 and #17 respectively. 

The 2024 Docker State of Application Development Report is intended to provide a "deep-focus snapshot of the rapidly evolving world of software development today". 

TypeScript 5.5 is now available as a release candidate. This version adds support for the proposed ECMAScript Set methods, as well as inferred type predicates and the ability to narrow expressions for flow of control for constant indexed accesses.

There's a self-paced. YouTube-based course by Mycelial on
the ins and outs of SQLite. It's short, succinct and free and a must watch for anybody wanting to get started with  SQLite.

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2022 v17.11 Preview 1, the first preview of the next update for Visual Studio 2022. The developers say this update focuses on quality of life improvements for developers. Meanwhile, Microsoft has also released an updated version of new Extension Manager as an on-by-default preview feature starting with Visual Studio 17.10.

The first release of SQL was in June 1974. Designed at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce, it was based on the relational model proposed by E.F. Codd. SQL became the most widely used database language with many dialects, the most recent being SQL 2023.

To celebrate the 80th anniversary of D-Day there's a new addition to the line up of cryptographic machines on Martin Gillow's VirtualColossus website - a 3D simulation of the Hagelin M-209 cipher machine, used by the US military primarily in World War II, though it remained in active use through the Korean War.

This is an extended version of the newsletter emailed to subscribers every Wednesday. It lists the week's news items, Book Review and additions to Book Watch and the week's two feature articles. This week Harry Fairhead and Mike James explore using the Raspberry Pi's GPIO library in Python  and Mike James looks at the basics of writing threadsafe code in C++.

Today, June 7th 2024 is the 70th anniversary of the untimely death of Alan Turing. While we now commemorate him for his contributions to code-breaking computer science and artificial intelligence, seventy years ago his wartime contributions were still cloaked in secrecy and his homosexuality was considered, and treated as, a crime. 

Google has created the Google Developer Program "to help developers build, learn and grow". The program will give developers access to a range of new tools and benefits such as technical assistance from Gemini. The program is open to developers worldwide and is free to join.