April Week 3
Written by Editor   
Saturday, 24 April 2021

If you want to get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer, our weekly digest summarizes the articles, book reviews, and news written each day by programmers, for programmers together with our full-length articles, this week a discussion of closure in Python and tutorial on casting in C#.

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April 15 - 21, 2021    

Featured Articles    

Programmer's Python - Closure

Mike James

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Closure - what's that all about. As it happens it's all surprisingly logical once you know why Python implements closure.  Closure motivated and explained in this extract from my book, Programmer's Python: Everything is an Object.


Deep C# - Casting the Escape from Strong Typing
Mike James
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Casting is one of the most confusing aspects of any modern language and it often makes beginners think hard. But if you know why you are doing it then the how makes a lot more sense.


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Programming News and Views  

Copying From Stack Overflow - It's Not Just A Joke
21 Apr | Sue Gee
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On April 1st Stack Overflow played a prank that had some of its community really worried - it was going to make us pay for copying code. But as with all good jokes there was a payoff. Stack Overflow was able to quantify not only the extent the copying happens but give details of what is copied.


Node.js 16 Adds Apple Silicon Support
21 Apr | Kay Ewbank
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Node.js, the JavaScript runtime, is available with built-in support for Apple Silicon for the first time. The new release also improves its support for Promises, and has the updated 9.0 release of the V8 JavaScript engine.


Open Source On Mars Acknowledged With A Badge
20 Apr | Lucy Black
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Ingenuity has made its maiden flight on Mars. It may only have lasted a few seconds, but signals an incredible achievement. It was done thanks to open source software and the nearly 12,000 developers who, mostly unknowingly, contributed to projects used now have the Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on their GitHub profiles. 


Visual Studio 2022 Will Be 64-bit
20 Apr | Kay Ewbank
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Microsoft has released details of Visual Studio 2022, a preview of which will be released this summer. The headline change is that the new version will be 64-bit.


Microsoft Offers Rust For Windows
19 Apr | Mike James
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Rust seems to be the great saviour of programming at the moment and Microsoft is the latest to jump on the bandwagon with Rust for Windows.


RubyMine Adds Ruby3 RBS Support
19 Apr | Kay Ewbank
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RubyMine 2021.1 has been released with improvements including Ruby 3.0 RBS support and better code completion. Other improvements include space integration and the inclusion of Code With Me.



Drone Software Defies Imagination
18 Apr | Lucy Black
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The Guinness World Record for the number of UAVs - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones - airborne simultaneously has been broken again. Watch the spectacle and consider the programming effort that must have been involved.


Is Australia The Best Place For Developers?
16 Apr | Janet Swift
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DevSkiller has released its third annual report on IT skills, revealing that Australian developers score the highest on coding tests and that Australia comes second only to Switzerland in terms of annual salary for software developers.


Amazon Announces OpenSearch
16 Apr | Kay Ewbank
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Amazon has announced an open source search and analytics suite. OpenSearch is an open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana.


Love It or Hate It, Gradle Reaches Version 7.0
15 Apr | Nikos Vaggalis
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Gradle is a tool that always stirs arguments among developers. Let's see what version 7 brings and breaks.


Deno Developers Form Company
15 Apr | Kay Ewbank
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The developers of Deno, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime from the creator of Node.js, have announced they've formed a company and had an injection of funds.

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Books of the Week

If you want to purchase, or to know more about, any of the titles listed below from Amazon, click on the book jackets at the top of the right sidebar. If you do make Amazon purchases after this, we may earn a few cents through the Amazon Associates program which is a source of revenue that enables us to continue posting.

Full Review 

Reviewer: Janet Swift  Rating: 3 out of 5
Excel is a fascinating piece of software, partly because it's easy enough for any computer user to use in a very basic way, has functions and features to do powerful data analysis, and once you add VBA into the mix the possibilities are scary.

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    Last Updated ( Saturday, 24 April 2021 )