Today, December 9th 2018, is the 112th anniversary of the birth of Grace Hopper. Her continuing legacy has been to inspire efforts to enhance the career interests of women in computing. Her concern for teaching young people is why Computer Science Education Week and the Hour of Code are timed to coincide with her birthday.

Programmer gifts - easy idea, difficult implementation. Try these out and you can trust me - I'm a programmer. No, really I am.

Every day I Programmer has new material - book reviews, articles and news - written by programmers, for programmers. Each week our digest gives a handy summary of the latest content. While you are on the site there's plenty more to explore. So if it is your first visit use links and the menus to follow up on topics of interest.

The 2018 Rust Survey attracted more responses than in previous years and a greater proportion of respondents were active users of the language. 

When we covered the news that Microsoft was giving up on its own browser, Edge, and moving instead to use Chromium last week, it had the status of a rumor. Now Microsoft has confirmed that it is all true and there are some extra surprises - it's a Win32 app for one!

Is Google's Flutter just another attempt to rescue a failed language - Dart - or is it the future of mobile development? It really is too early to say, but with the release of Flutter 1.0 the balance seems to be moving to the future view.

The first preview of the next major version of Visual Studio has been released and shown off at Connect(), Microsoft's developer conference.

.NET used to be one of the biggest things in town and then Microsoft decided to go in other directions with WinRT. Part of the .NET system was WPF, arguably the most advanced GUI framework ever. Now the unbelievable has happened - it has been open sourced along with Windows Forms and Windows UX.

Support for Cassandra has been added to DataGrip, JetBrain's IDE for databases and SQL. The 2018.3 release also improves PostgreSQL support, and the ability to generate SQL for selected objects.

Mozilla revenue rose by over $40 million USD in 2017 which sounds good until you notice that its expenses went up by over $80 million.

Amazon has released a preview of Corretto, a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. The announcement was made soon after Amazon promised to continue long-term support for the OpenJDK 8 and 11 runtimes in Amazon Linux. Amazon plans to make Corretto the default OpenJDK on Amazon Linux in 2019.

Details are emerging of what the next version of the Go language will look like, along with concrete information on which of the future changes are going to make it into the next incremental release.

If you want to do computer vision and don't want to spend years developing the code from scratch, you probably need OpenCV. After a wait of nearly 4 years, OpenCV 4.0 has arrived.

A misguided attempt to remove swearwords from comments embedded in Linux kernel code has itself been greeted with a torrent of comment.  It has to be noted that most of the discussion on the Linux mailing list is remarkably moderate in tone and  comes to an acceptable conclusion.

This sounds wonderful. If only it was going to be available to order in time for the holiday season.  However, it might cost you a lot more than the $400 price tag suggests. Reinforcement racing anyone?

Catch up with everything on I Programmer last week. Our digest gives links to news coverage plus the week's book reviews and additions to Book Watch. The list finishes with an extract from Android Programming in Kotlin showing how to create an Android UI using code and a history article, John Backus - the Father of Fortran.  

There's a new version of TypeScript that has tightened up type-checking for methods on functions, and added a way to handle spreads of existing objects into new objects.

Google has updated Dart with a new version, 2.1, that has smaller code size, has faster tools, and offers faster type checks.