We are now very familiar with robots - machines that posses artificial intelligence and perform tasks that humans find arduous or simply unattractive. What you might not know is that word robot comes from the Czech for "forced labour". 

OK, if we are going to be 100% accurate it's only half a brain, but the question still stands. In a remarkable team effort, the wiring diagram, the connectome, for the largest chunk of neural tissue yet, has been mapped out - but this is a long way from understanding it.

Every day I Programmer has new material written by programmers, for programmers. This weekly digest gives a summary of the latest content, which this week includes an extract from Harry Fairhead's book Fundamental C and an in-depth look at dynamic typing in C#.

It is now a tradition that Google reveals the date of its annual developer conference via a game or puzzle. Yesterday, which is a bit earlier than usual, the company, initiated the challenge to discover the date of the 2020 event.

The latest version of Pharo, the open-source language and core library following in the tradition of Smalltalk, has been released. It brings several new tools in preview, updated git clients and system browsers, and a move to the 64-bit version as the recommended version for Windows.

There will no longer be a fee for Komodo, the multi-language IDE for Python, PHP, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, Node.js, Golang, Ruby, Perl, and a variety of other languages and frameworks. 

Splice Machine, a database that combines Hadoop and traditional relational abilities, has been updated. The new version offers improved SQL coverage, better workload management, and Kubernetes support.

One of the irritations of JavaScript's wonderful async and await approach is that you have to use it in a function. This is a limitation hat seems to be about to go away when you read headlines like "Top level Await Implemented In V8". However, you need to read the small print.

Software Developers are in demand all over the world, which is great if you fancy a change of scene. In its 2020 report Devskiller finds that JavaScript is the must-have skill required by employers across the globe.

A brand-new Professional Certificate that includes a crash course on Python programming is now available on the Coursera platform. It is aimed at those looking to start a career in an IT role such as Systems Administrator or IT support specialist and consists of six short courses.

Google has made ALBERT (A Lite BERT) available in an open source version. ALBERT is a deep-learning natural language processing model that the developers say uses far fewer parameters than BERT without sacrificing accuracy.

Python is an attractive language with a good community for support and development, but is the price for this speed? Machine learning researchers at EPFL have put it to the test and found it not wanting.

There's a new version of MariaDB that is designed to make it easier to develop apps using smart transactions and cloud-native data storage. 

We don't really consider the effects that our user interfaces have on human behavior. Could it be that we are changing the way people think about time and space simply by showing them a bar indicator of battery state?

There are two types of people in this world - no it's not "that" joke - those who revel in fonts and all things to do with them and those who hardly notice them. So the news that JetBrains has a new programming font will either excite you or leave you wondering what the fuss is about.

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. In this week's featured articles, Ian Elliot looks at variables and expressions in PHP and Nikos Vaggalis has a commentary on the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on encryption. 

It's time to get ready for Hash Code 2020, Google's team programming competition in which participants solve Google-inspired engineering problems. This is the seventh edition of contest and the second time it has been open on a global scale.

Having failed to augment its revenue stream with paid-for services, Mozilla has laid off about 70 employees, a figure that is likely to rise as Mozilla in still in a consultation process in the UK and France.