Microsoft says work on the next two versions of TypeScript is going well, with both TypeScript 6 and 7 on course to appear in early 2026. TypeScript 7.0 is the version that is being rewritten in native code, while TypeScript 6.0 will be the last version of the JavaScript-based version/ 

Udacity is encouraging us to put the holiday time to good use with a special offer running until the New Year - 40% off across all its programs when you pay in advance. 

Deno 2.6 has been released with a new tool, dx, that is an equivalent to npx and is a way to run binaries from npm and JSR packages.

The only known photographs of Ada Lovelace, which were withdrawn from an online auction in June, have been acquired by the UK National Portrait Gallery.

If you are enjoying a festive break there's plenty to entertain and enlighten you on I Programmer, including Donald Knuth's latest Christmas lecture. You can catch up with the whole year using back issues of this Weekly Digest and to stay on top next year, sign up now for our weekly newsletter.

It is an annual I Programmer tradition to celebrate the birth of Charles Babbage, the man who invented and designed a programmable computer at the start of the Industrial Age, and who is now recognized as the Father of the Computer. 

If you've been cursing the sticky tape and searching fruitlessly for the scissors, maybe a robot is the solution. The team behind the Humanoid HMND 01 Alpha Bipedal certainly thinks so. The company has released a tongue in cheek video for the holidays that is a tribute to one of the scenes from the classic film “Love Actually.”

Yes I know we have all seen enough visualizations of sorting algorithms to last a lifetime - which is how long a bubble sort generally takes. But it's the holiday season and sorting is one programmer way to create a tree.

Its Xmas and Xmas means  Donald Knuth putting on his flamboyant Xmas top and talking to us about something that most of us know nothing about? Of course not. This year it's all about the Knight's Tour which is more interesting than anything a salesman could get up to.

The annual Santa tech-fest is well under way, with Santa trackers from both Google and NORAD counting down to the big day to see how Santa is doing on sorting out who's been naughty and who's been nice. 

Google has "dropped", in the new sense of the term which means "launched", Gemini 3 Flash, the latest Google model. The Gemini team says Gemini 3 offers frontier intelligence and is built for speed at a fraction of the cost. 

The Apache Pulsar team has announced the release of Apache Pulsar Client C++ version 4.0.0. Improvements include support for getting the encryption context on a message, and for getting the producer name of a message. The supported C++ standard has also been upgraded to version 17. 

Agentic AI and MPC are coming on strong in the database market. After the likes of Postgres and Oracle, now it's MongoDB's turn to incorporate MCP.

Microsoft has deprecated IntelliCode extensions for VS Code in favor of GitHub Copilot Chat. While this also provides advanced suggestions and inline completions, its free tier is limited to 2,000 suggestions per month, and as Copilot provides a suggestion with every input, this doesn't last long.

It is official - Xmas is NP hard. See exactly how and appreciate the value of holiday algorithms.

Our top feature this week is a bonus chapter for the highly regarded "Programmer's Guide To Theory", a book in which Mike James sets out to present the fundamental ideas of computer science in an informal, and yet informative, way. Next up we have Ian Elliot explaining the notion of a "First Class Function". Plus the week's news and additions to Book Watch.