Programming News and Views
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Charles Babbage - Born This Day 154 Years Ago 26 Dec | Historian  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. |
Humanoid Alpha Learns To Wrap Xmas Presents 26 Dec | Lucy Black  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.” |
Xmas Tree? Sorted! 25 Dec | Mike James  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. |
Knuth's Xmas Lecture 2025 - The Knight's Adventure 24 Dec | Mike James  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. |
Getting Ready For Santa 24 Dec | Lucy Black  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 Releases Gemini 3 Flash 23 Dec | Kay Ewbank  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. |
Apache Pulsar Client C++ 4.0 Released 23 Dec | Kay Ewbank  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. |
MongoDB Now Does MCP 22 Dec | Nikos Vaggalis  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. |
VSCode Abandoning IntelliCode 22 Dec | Kay Ewbank  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. |
Christmas Is NP Hard 21 Dec | I Programmer  It is official - Xmas is NP hard. See exactly how and appreciate the value of holiday algorithms. |
December Week 3 20 Dec | Editor  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. |
Presents For Programmers 2025 19 Dec | Lucy Black  We're fast approaching Panic Weekend, when those of us who've been trying to forget about the upcoming holidays face up to the reality that the present giving season is happening whether we're ready or not. So if you're still in need of some festive ideas, we've come up with a few that might rescue you. |
The Gist Of The NODES 2025 Dev Conference 19 Dec | Nikos Vaggalis  NODES is the biggest graph community gathering dedicated to applications, data intelligence, knowledge graphs, and AI. |
Turn Claude Into Your Personal Research Assistant 18 Dec | Nikos Vaggalis  Claude Scientific Skills give Claude super powers, not just on coding, but about any science. We try them out to see what's on offer. |
Android Studio Otter 2 Is Stable 18 Dec | Kay Ewbank  The Android developer team has announced that Android Studio Otter 2 Feature Drop is stable. Feature Drop is the term used for updates that are built on top of the IntelliJ platform updates, and follow soon after each new "animal" release - in this case Otter. |
Make Merry With the ESP32 17 Dec | Harry Fairhead  For me 2025 was the year of the Espressif ESP32 - well it extended back into 2024. By the end of the year I was convinced that for the sort of IoT projects that I want to do around my own home the ESP32 S3 is the single board microcontroller of choice and I heartily recommend it to any programmer wanting to get into the IoT scene. |
Apple Just Lost The Epic App Store Battle - Again! 17 Dec | Mike James  Apple can't seem to catch a break at the moment. It keeps appealing and it keeps losing. Now its appeal against an injunction that called for it to reduce fees for external in app purchases has been rejected. |
JetBrains - Work With AI Effectively 16 Dec | Nikos Vaggalis  In cooperation with the Nebius AI cloud platform, JetBrains has launched a set of ten free courses for developers that demonstrate how to incorporate AI in their workflow to become 10X productive. |
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Featured Articles
What If Babbage..? 26 Dec | Mike James  What if the computer had been invented in the Victorian era? This isn’t a silly idea. Charles Babbage was born in the eighteenth century - the age of the Industrial Revolution. The calculating machines he invented, although never fully realized in his lifetime, are rightly seen as the forerunners of modern programmable computers. What if he had succeeded? |
The Trick Of The Mind - The Goto Fixed! 24 Dec | Mike James  We all know about the problems with the goto instruction, but after we learned it was harmful what exactly did we do about it? This is an extract from my book Trick of the Mind, which explores what it is to be a programmer. |
Getting started with App Inventor 2 18 Dec | Mike James  MIT App Inventor is the ideal way to get started with programming, but getting started with App Inventor has some small problems all of its own. In this guide we find out the best way to write and run a simple program. |
What Would P=NP Look Like? 15 Dec | Mike James  The question of whether the class of problems called NP is the same as the class P is one of the million dollar millennium prize challenges. Even if it wasn't, it would still be important. If NP=P then the world is a very strange place. This is a bonus chapter for Programmer's Guide To Theory. |
What Exactly Is A First Class Function - And Why You Should Care 12 Dec | Ian Elliot  You may have heard people saying that, in some language or another, functions were first class objects, or have come across the term "first class function". What does it mean? And why is it so good? |
Unhandled Exception!
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Book Watch
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Book Watch is I Programmer's listing of new books and is compiled using publishers' publicity material. It is not to be read as a review where we provide an independent assessment. Some but by no means all of the books in Book Watch are eventually reviewed.
Minecraft Annual 2026 (Farshore) 26 Dec This is the official Minecraft Annual for 2026, full of updates, builds, and activities, along with all there is to know about the past year of Minecraft. Stuffed to the brim with updates, activities, step-by-step builds and tips and tricks for the game, this book is a must-have for any minecrafter. This year’s annual includes a biome personality quiz, loads of fun activities and tips on surviving a trial chamber, where to find all the wolf variants and how to loot an ancient city. Plus discover a mob board game, awesome builds and survival challenges for you to complete in-game. <ASIN:0008682208> |
Cult of the Dead Cow (Public Affairs) 24 Dec This book is the tale of the oldest active hacking group in the USA. Joseph Menn explores the Cult of the Dead Cow from its origins back in the 80s, and looks at its oddball characters—activists, artists, and musicians—some of whom went on to advise presidents, cabinet members, and CEOs, and who now walk the corridors of power in Washington and Silicon Valley. Featuring a new afterword with updates on the collective, Cult of the Dead Cow describes how, at a time when governments, corporations, and criminals hold immense power, a small band of tech iconoclasts is on our side fighting back. <ASIN:1541706110 > |
Latency: Reduce delay in software systems (Manning) 22 Dec This book looks at latency from first principles to production-ready code, and shows how to make your software faster at every layer of the stack. Pekka Enberg explains what latency really is, how it differs from bandwidth, and why it matters for user experience. Using practical examples, later chapters show how to apply Little’s Law, design lock-free algorithms, and design caching systems that scale. Enberg explains how code runs differently on distributed systems, databases, and operating systems, and how to understand the common latency-causing issues in each situation. <ASIN:1633438082 > |
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