The Register: And now for something completely different: Python 3.12. “Python 3.12, the latest stable release of the Python programming language, was released on Monday, offering developers a handful of new capabilities and the removal of some cruft.”
Wolfram Blog: Creamy or Crunchy: Visualizing Food Protein Structures in Wolfram Language. “Explore protein structures with the new Wolfram ProteinVisualization paclet and the BioMoleculePlot3D resource function. Designed for researchers, educators and all structural biology enthusiasts, the paclet offers an immersive experience for viewing the intricate structures of biomolecules, including proteins, nucleic acids and their complexes.”
The Register: IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you . “IBM is giving its mainframe customers a tool infused with generative AI to translate COBOL code to Java as part of application modernization efforts. The watsonx Code Assistant for Z is set to be available sometime in Q4 2023. Big Blue says it can speed translation of COBOL to Java on its Z mainframes.”
The Verge: Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel. “Microsoft is bringing popular programming language Python to Excel. A public preview of the feature is available today, allowing Excel users to manipulate and analyze data from Python.”
ZDNet: GitHub built a new search engine for code ‘from scratch’ in Rust. “The Rust programming language continues to grow in popularity and now developer platform GitHub has used it to build its new code-focused search engine, Blackbird. Instead of perusing forums for answers, GitHub wants users to use its search engine, which is currently in beta.”
Wolfram Blog: New Interactive Course Teaches Useful Tips from an Expert Programmer. “Wolfram Language has a wealth of built-in functions that require little or no programming, but there are special cases that require additional skill and knowledge to get the code to do things that go beyond those built-in capabilities. Wolfram U is pleased to announce a new free interactive course by veteran Wolfram programmer and instructor Dave Withoff that offers a collection of useful tips and instruction for intermediate-level programmers.” The link also includes a recommendation for a beginner course if you’re not an intermediate programmer.
The Verge: Google’s making code formatting a breeze in Docs. “Google Docs is getting a new feature that will make it easier to show code in an easy-to-understand way. The company announced that it’s adding code blocks to its ‘smart canvas’ system, which will automatically add the proper spacing and color-coding for a variety of programming languages, such as Python, C, and Javascript.”
Education Technology: Micro:bit launches new Python Editor to help more children learn text-based coding languages. “Micro:bit Educational Foundation, the education non-profit on a mission to enhance children’s digital skills, today announces it is making it even easier for children to learn the text-based coding skills needed to access some of the most in-demand tech jobs. Its new Python Editor – used in conjunction with the BBC micro:bit, its handheld coding devices – is purpose-built to address the hurdles learners usually face in working with the type of languages used by most developers by creating a more user-friendly and intuitive learning experience.”
9to5Google: Carbon, a new programming language from Google, aims to be C++ successor. “Carbon, the latest programming language to be built within Google, was unveiled today as an experimental successor to C++.”
MakeUseOf: Try Python in Your Browser With These Free Online Interactive Shells. “To start coding in Python as quickly as possible, you can use an online interactive shell. This is a website that lets you write and run Python code in your browser, with instant results. There’s no need to install anything. Whether you’re exploring Python functions or reviewing the basics of arrays and lists, you can do so right in your browser. You’ll find these online Python interpreters highly valuable.”
Bleeping Computer: Embed Python scripts in HTML with PyScript. “The new PyScript project lets you embed Python programs directly in HTML pages and execute them within the browser without any server-based requirements. The project was announced this weekend at PyCon US 2022 and acts as a wrapper around the Pyodide project, which loads the CPython interpreter as a WebAssembly browser module.”
VentureBeat: PolyCoder is an open source AI code-generator that researchers claim trumps Codex. “…while research labs like OpenAI and Alphabet-backed DeepMind have developed powerful code-generating AI, many of the most capable systems aren’t available in open source. For example, the training data for OpenAI’s Codex, which powers GitHub’s Copilot feature, hasn’t been made publicly available, preventing researchers from fine-tuning the AI model or studying aspects of it such as interpretability. To remedy this, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — Frank Xu, Uri Alon, Graham Neubig, and Vincent Hellendoorn — developed PolyCoder, a model based on OpenAI’s GPT-2 language model that was trained on a database of 249GB of code across 12 programming languages.”
EurekAlert: New data science platform speeds up Python queries. “Researchers from Brown University and MIT have developed a new data science framework that allows users to process data with the programming language Python — without paying the ‘performance tax’ normally associated with a user-friendly language.” The new platform is free.
The Register: The nightmare is real: ‘Excel formulas are the world’s most widely used programming language,’ says Microsoft. “Microsoft will let users create custom functions in Excel using the number wrangler’s own formula language….Dubbed LAMBDA, the feature (currently rolling out to beta customers) will be a lifesaver for anyone charged with maintaining herds of increasingly complicated spreadsheets, who have doubtlessly been wondering how it could be that Excel was missing such a seemingly obvious ability for so many decades.”
Ars Technica: The unreasonable effectiveness of the Julia programming language. “I’ve been running into a lot of happy and excited scientists lately. ‘Running into’ in the virtual sense, of course, as conferences and other opportunities to collide with scientists in meatspace have been all but eliminated. Most scientists believe in the germ theory of disease. Anyway, these scientists and mathematicians are excited about a new tool. It’s not a new particle accelerator nor a supercomputer. Instead, this exciting new tool for scientific research is… a computer language.”
