An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: Netflix is killing its most interesting shows in their infancy and it could be the streaming giant's downfall. In the seven years that Netflix has produced original content, the world of TV streaming has dramatically changed. Now Netflix is getting left behind in the race it started. Many of its unique and ambitious shows have been canceled before they could reach their full potential. And Netflix keeps churning out more shows each year, without replicating the breakout success of 2016's "Stranger Things."

Statements from executives have described the cancellations as the result of a cost analysis that tells Netflix a longer-running show won't lead to new subscribers. Still, with syndicated shows such as "The Office" and "Friends" leaving its platform and a string of disappointing cancellations, including "Glow," Netflix has set itself up for a disaster when it comes to its reputation as a TV-watcher's must-have service. In 2020 alone, Netflix has canceled 18 original series. Of those, 14 had only one season. [...] TV lovers in these fandoms can only be burned so many times before they stop investing. Why should a Netflix subscriber spend 10 hours watching a new show if there's a decent chance they'll never see it end?

Python has reached "a new all-time high" on TIOBE's index of programming language popularity. TechRadar reports: Java's days as the world's second most popular programming language could be numbered according to Tiobe's latest programming language rankings which show Python is becoming increasingly popular among developers. The firm's Index for October 2020 shows that Java has been overtaken by C as the world's most popular programming language when compared to the same period last year. Python remains in third place but it's quickly closing the gap between it and Java. According to Tiobe CEO Paul Jensen, C and Java have held the top two spots consistently for the past two decades. However, the 25-year-old programming language Java is approaching its "all time low" in popularity as it has fallen by 4.32 percentage points when compared to where it stood in October of last year. Tiobe ranks programming languages in its popularity index based on the number of hits each language gets across 25 search engines.
RedMonk's rankings already show Python as more popular than Java — the first time since 2012 that Java isn't one of their top two most popular languages. And TIOBE's CEO says "Let's see what will happen the next few months."

Here's their October rankings for the top 10 most popular programming languages.

• C
• Java
• Python
• C++
• C#
• Visual Basic
• JavaScript
• PHP
• R
• SQL

And coming in at #11 is Perl.

After 44 years, there's finally a better way to find approximate solutions to the notoriously difficult traveling salesperson problem. From a report: When Nathan Klein started graduate school two years ago, his advisers proposed a modest plan: to work together on one of the most famous, long-standing problems in theoretical computer science. Even if they didn't manage to solve it, they figured, Klein would learn a lot in the process. He went along with the idea. "I didn't know to be intimidated," he said. "I was just a first-year grad student -- I don't know what's going on." Now, in a paper posted online in July, Klein and his advisers at the University of Washington, Anna Karlin and Shayan Oveis Gharan, have finally achieved a goal computer scientists have pursued for nearly half a century: a better way to find approximate solutions to the traveling salesperson problem. This optimization problem, which seeks the shortest (or least expensive) round trip through a collection of cities, has applications ranging from DNA sequencing to ride-sharing logistics. Over the decades, it has inspired many of the most fundamental advances in computer science, helping to illuminate the power of techniques such as linear programming. But researchers have yet to fully explore its possibilities -- and not for want of trying. The traveling salesperson problem "isn't a problem, it's an addiction," as Christos Papadimitriou, a leading expert in computational complexity, is fond of saying.

Most computer scientists believe that there is no algorithm that can efficiently find the best solutions for all possible combinations of cities. But in 1976, Nicos Christofides came up with an algorithm that efficiently finds approximate solutions -- round trips that are at most 50% longer than the best round trip. At the time, computer scientists expected that someone would soon improve on Christofides' simple algorithm and come closer to the true solution. But the anticipated progress did not arrive. "A lot of people spent countless hours trying to improve this result," said Amin Saberi of Stanford University. Now Karlin, Klein and Oveis Gharan have proved that an algorithm devised a decade ago beats Christofides' 50% factor, though they were only able to subtract 0.2 billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent. Yet this minuscule improvement breaks through both a theoretical logjam and a psychological one. Researchers hope that it will open the floodgates to further improvements.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Tuesday, Congress revealed whether it thinks Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are sitting on monopolies. In some cases, the answer was yes. But also, one app developer revealed to Congress that it -- just like WordPress -- had been forced to monetize a largely free app. That developer testified that Apple had demanded in-app purchases (IAP), even though Apple had approved its app without them two years earlier -- and that when the dev dared send an email to customers notifying them of the change, Apple threatened to remove the app and blocked all updates. That developer was ProtonMail, makers of an encrypted email app, and CEO Andy Yen had some fiery words for Apple in an interview with The Verge this week. We've known for months that WordPress and Hey weren't alone in being strong-armed by the most valuable company in the world, ever since Stratechery's Ben Thompson reported that 21 different app developers quietly told him they'd been pushed to retroactively add IAP in the wake of those two controversies. But until now, we hadn't heard of many devs willing to publicly admit it. They were scared.

And they're still scared, says Yen. Even though Apple changed its rules on September 11th to exempt "free apps acting as a stand-alone companion to a paid web based tool" from the IAP requirement -- Apple explicitly said email apps are exempt -- ProtonMail still hasn't removed its own in-app purchases because it fears retaliation from Apple, he says. He claims other developers feel the same way: "There's a lot of fear in the space right now; people are completely petrified to say anything." [...] "For the first two years we were in the App Store, that was fine, no issues there," he says. (They'd launched on iOS in 2016.) "But a common practice we see ... as you start getting significant uptake in uploads and downloads, they start looking at your situation more carefully, and then as any good Mafia extortion goes, they come to shake you down for some money."

Alphabet's Google got a mixed reception at the U.S. Supreme Court as it sought to overturn a ruling that could force the company to pay billions of dollars for improperly using Oracle's copyrighted code in the Android operating system. From a report: Holding a low-tech telephone session in one of the biggest software fights in American history, the justices on Wednesday questioned Google's contention that it had no way to replicate the code without forcing millions of software developers to learn a new programming language. Justice Neil Gorsuch told Google's lawyer that Apple and other companies have "come up with phones that work just fine without engaging in this kind of copying." But Gorsuch also raised the possibility of returning the case to a federal appeals court for another look at Google's contention that it engaged in legitimate "fair use" of Oracle's Java programming language. Oracle says it's entitled to at least $8.8 billion in damages. A jury found that Google's code copying was a legitimate fair use, but a federal appeals court reversed that finding.

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Sourcegraph, a company specializing in universal code search, polled more than 500 North American software developers to identify issues in code complexity and management. Its general findings are probably no surprise to most Ars readers — software has gotten bigger, more complex, and much more important in the past ten years — but the sheer scope can be surprising... When asked how the size of the codebase across their entire company, measured in megabytes and the number of repositories, has changed in the past decade, over half (51%) of software development stakeholders reported they have more than 100 times the volume of code they had 10 years ago. And a staggering 18% say they have 500 times more code.
Ars also reports another surprising finding: 91% of the surveyed developers said their non-technology company "functions more like a technology company than it did ten years ago.

"This won't surprise anyone who has noticed firms like Walmart Labs sponsoring open source technology conferences and delivering presentations."

"To teach the next generation of computer scientists the basics of Python programming, Microsoft recently announced a partnership with NASA to create a series of lessons based on space exploration efforts," reports TechRepublic: Overall, the project includes three different NASA-inspired lessons... The Introduction to Python for Space Exploration lesson will provide students with "an introduction to the types of space exploration problems that Python and data science can influence." Made up of eight units in total, this module also details the upcoming Artemis lunar exploration mission.

In another learning path, students will learn to design an AI model capable of classifying different types of space rocks depicted in random photos, according to Microsoft. However, the company recommends a "basic understanding of Python for Data Science" as a prerequisite for this particular lesson. The last of the three learning paths serves as an introduction to machine learning and demonstrates ways these technologies can help assist with space exploration operations.

Students are presented real-world NASA challenges, particularly rocket launch delays, and learn how the agency can leverage machine learning to resolve the issues... Microsoft also announced partnerships with Wonder Woman 1984 and Smithsonian Learning Labs to curate five additional programming lessons for students.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, writing at CNBC: In the first few years of Netflix, we were growing fast and needed to hire more software engineers. With my new understanding that high talent density would be the engine of our success, we focused on finding the top performers in the market. In Silicon Valley, many of them worked for Google, Apple, and Facebook -- and they were being paid a lot. We didn't have the cash to lure them away in any numbers. But, as an engineer, I was familiar with a concept that has been understood in software since 1968, referred to as the "rock-star principle." The rock-star principle is rooted in a famous study that took place in a basement in Santa Monica, California. At 6:30 a.m., nine trainee programmers were led into a room with dozens of computers. Each was handed a manila envelope, explaining a series of coding and debugging tasks they would need to complete to their best ability in the next 120 minutes. The researchers expected that the best programmer would outperform his average counterpart by a factor of two or three. But it turned out that the most skilled programmer far outperformed the worst. He was 20 times faster at coding, 25 times faster at debugging, and 10 times faster at program execution than the programmer with the lowest marks.

This study has caused ripples across the software industry since it was published, as managers grapple with how some programmers can be worth so much more than their perfectly adequate colleagues. With a fixed amount of money for salaries and a project I needed to complete, I had a choice: Hire 10 to 25 average engineers, or hire one "rock-star" and pay significantly more than what I'd pay the others, if necessary. Over the years, I've come to see that the best programmer doesn't add 10 times the value. He or she adds more like a 100 times. Bill Gates, whom I worked with while on the Microsoft board, purportedly went further. He is often quoted as saying, "A great lathe operator commands several times the wages of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer." In the software industry, this is a known principle (although still much debated). I started thinking about where this model applied outside the software industry. The reason the rock-star engineer is so much more valuable than his counterparts isn't unique to programming. The great software engineer is incredibly creative and can see conceptual patterns that others can't.

"To celebrate Java's 25th anniversary this year and the latest release of Java 15, JetBrains has compiled data from multiple sources to look at what the current state of the language," reports SD Times: The largest concentration of Java developers is in Asia, where 2.5 million developers use it as their primary language. JetBrains believes this may be due to the fact that it is common to hire offshore developers in countries like China and India to build Android apps. "We might have expected the USA to have a high percentage of Java users, but it also makes a lot of sense that they don't. There is a big technology stack to choose from and often a lot of the tech companies are at the forefront of that stack, so it could be that developers there don't need the power or stability of Java and are using languages that allow them to build and test quickly," JetBrains wrote in a post.
The post on JetBrains notes that the six countries with the highest percentage of developers using Java as their primary language are: China, South Korea, India, Germany, Spain, and Brazil: The reasons Java is most likely so popular in the first 6 countries include the free use of Java, governmental support, and open-source... Germany is also very high which could be attributed to Java being the most popular language in Germany for software engineers as it is used to build highly scalable applications for a multitude of industries. Most enterprise services rely on Java to power the applications that enable the day-to-day running of businesses, such as payroll, inventory management, reporting, and so on. Germany also has a big financial sector that uses Java heavily for their homegrown tech, such as trading bots, retail banking systems, and other applications that the finance industry requires in order to remain competitive...

According to the State of the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2020, more than a third of professional developers use Java as a primary language and Java remains the second primary language among professional developers after JavaScript. Expert analysis: It is not surprising to see JavaScript and Java taking the leading positions as they are kind of paired together; developers who work with Java often write their frontend and any quick scripts in JavaScript. Python is probably third place due to the spread of machine learning. In general, we expect the web to be a big part of the developer ecosystem and so JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and PHP will always have solid standing. SQL is also always going to be around as there isn't much that doesn't require databases in some capacity. C++ is also kind of a solid language in that it is used for a lot of embedded applications, so it won't be disappearing off the charts any time soon. C# though seems to be losing ground, and I guess if Java is high then C# will be low, as they are both very similar in terms of capabilities.

As to why I think Java is so high in the sphere of professional development — it's similar to what was mentioned about Germany. Most enterprise business services rely on Java to make them tick along. It's not just the IT sector either — almost every company, be it in distribution, manufacturing, or banking, has IT services as part of their infrastructure, and these services, such as payroll or inventory management, are generally built with Java in the backend. So Java is used a lot by professional developers who work for these companies.

Michael Ilseman, an engineer on the Swift Standard Library team at Apple, writes: In June, Apple introduced Swift System, a new library for Apple platforms that provides idiomatic interfaces to system calls and low-level currency types. Today, I'm excited to announce that we're open-sourcing System and adding Linux support! Our vision is for System to eventually act as the single home for low-level system interfaces for all supported Swift platforms.

Legendary horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs is now open source, meaning that modders can dig in and see what lies underneath the hood of both games. Polygon reports: The full source code for The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs has been released on Github for folks who want to take a crack at modifying the game. It's relatively rare for developers to post their game codes themselves, though sometimes proprietary code can make its way online via leaks. "This doesn't mean that the game is suddenly free," Amnesia developer Frictional Games said in a blog post. "It just means that people are free to use the source however they want as long as they adhere to the GPL3 licence. The game and all of its content is still owned by Frictional Games. Just like before."

Seeing how these classic games are built will also mean seeing things like flaws, and inefficiencies Frictional Games warned -- but it's all still functional and potentially useful to anyone learning game development. "I also hope this release can be of help to anyone wanting to create their own engine or just wanting to learn more about game programming," Frictional Games said. "While the code is not the greatest in places and the tech used is not the latest, it is a fully contained game engine in a fairly easy-to-understand package. It is also a testament that it is possible to do this sort of thing, even with a very limited team."

Google has announced that Flutter, its open source UI development kit for building cross-platform software from the same codebase, is finally available for Windows apps in alpha. From a report:For the world's leading desktop operating system with some 1 billion installations of Windows 10 alone, this has been a long time coming. Flutter's alpha incarnation was initially launched at Google's I/O developer conference back in 2017, before arriving in beta less than a year later. In its original guise, Flutter was designed for Android and iOS app development, but it has since expanded to cover the web, MacOS, and Linux, which are currently available in various alpha or beta iterations. Developers have had to consider unique platform-specific factors when designing for the desktop or mobile phones, such as different screen sizes and how people interact with their devices. On smartphones, people typically use touch and swipe-based gestures, while keyboards and mice are commonly used on PCs and laptops. This means Flutter has had to expand its support to cover the additional inputs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos on Tuesday announced he's soon opening the first location of a network of tuition-free "Montessori-inspired" preschools for underserved children. In an Instagram post, Bezos said the first Bezos Academy will open in Des Moines, Wash., on Oct. 19. The network of schools will offer year-round programming, five days a week, for children between the ages of 3 and 5. Admissions will prioritize low-income families, according to the Bezos Day One Fund website.

"This classroom is just the beginning," Bezos wrote in a post featuring a photo of a preschool classroom. "The @bezosacademy opens its doors on Oct. 19th. This one in Des Moines, WA, is the first of many free preschools that we'll be opening for underserved children." The nonprofit organization says it wants to run the schools using the same set of principles that have driven e-commerce giant Amazon. "Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer," the organization said on its website.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "If we want all students to learn computer science (CS for All), we have to go to where the students are," writes University of Michigan Grand Valley State University CS Professor Mark Guzdial. "Unfortunately, that's not computer science class. In most US states, less than 5% of high school students take a course in computer science.

"Programming is applicable and useful in many domains today, so one answer is to use programming in science, mathematics, social studies, and other non-CS classes. We take programming to where the students are, and hope to increase their interest and knowledge about CS."

America's National Science Foundation (NSF) was intrigued enough by this idea to fund Creating Adoptable Computing Education Integrated into Social Studies Classes, a three-year project created by Guzdial and Grand Valley State University history professor Tamara Shreiner, a project which "aims to provide more students computing education by integrating programming activities into social studies classes and to use the computing to enhance students' data literacy." Along the same lines, the NSF has also greenlighted Northwestern University's CS professor Marcelo Worsley's Computational Thinking and Physical Computing in Physical Education for this fall, which will bring computer science to K-5 gym classes.

While the tech giants have lobbied for billions in spending on "rigorous" K-12 CS courses, could it be that the best "CS class" for most K-12 students is no CS class?

ZDNet reports: Oracle has released version 15 of Java, the language created 25 years ago by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems, which Oracle snapped up in 2009 for about $7.4bn to gain what it said was the "most important software Oracle has ever acquired". Java 15, or Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) 15, brings the Edwards-Curve digital signature algorithm, hidden classes, and former preview features that have been finalized, including text blocks, and the Z Garbage Collector, while the sealed-classes feature arrives and pattern matching and records emerge as a second preview...

In July, Java fell out of RedMonk's top two positions for the first time since 2012 and now resides behind JavaScript and Python in terms of popularity. Tiobe in September ranked Java in second position, behind C and ahead of Python.... But Java is still hugely popular and widely used in the enterprise, according to Oracle, which notes it is used by over 69% of full-time developers worldwide... It counts Arm, Amazon, IBM, Intel, NTT Data, Red Hat, SAP and Tencent among its list of notable contributors to JDK 15. Oracle also gave a special mention to Microsoft and cloud system monitoring service DataDog for fixes...

As part of Java's 25th anniversary, Oracle commissioned analyst firm Omdia to assess its six-month release strategy for Java and whether it would be enough to keep millions of Java developers away from memory-safe alternatives such as Kotlin, the language Google has endorsed for Android development, and Rust, a system programming language that was created at Mozilla. "In Omdia's opinion, the work Oracle began a few years ago in moving to a six-month update cycle and introducing a new level of modularity, puts the vendor in good stead with its constituency of approximately 12 million developers," Oracle said in its report on Omdia's analysis.

"However, Oracle and the Java programming language need an ongoing series of innovative, must-have, and 'delightful' features that make the language even more user friendly and cloud capable. These will keep existing Java developers happy while steering potential Java developers away from newer languages like Rust and Kotlin."

"Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to Linux kernel developers," reports ZDNet, "requesting that Linux run as the root partition on the Hyper-V, its hypervisor software for running Windows and non-Windows instances on hardware." Microsoft "wants to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor", according to Microsoft principle software engineer Wei Liu. Liu has proposed an RFC or request for comment that for now merely implements what are only the "absolutely necessary components to get things running... There will be a subsequent patch series to provide a device node (/dev/mshv) such that userspace programs can create and run virtual machines. We've also ported Cloud Hypervisor over and have been able to boot a Linux guest with Virtio devices since late July." Cloud Hypervisor is an experimental open-source hypervisor implementation from Intel written in the Rust programming language. It's a virtual-machine monitor that runs on top of KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor in the Linux kernel that's designed for cloud workloads...

Liu points out three more changes beyond amendments to the Hyper-V Top-Level Functional Specification. For example, Microsoft wants Linux to set up existing Hyper-V facilities differently. It also wants Linux kernel developers to change the kernel's behavior when accessing hardware memory in a way that affects driver access to the GPU and CPU that's being managed by an operating system memory manager. It's this issue that Microsoft engineers are least confident about and are asking for Linux developer support, according to Liu....

As Microsoft's executive VP of the cloud and enterprise group, Scott Guthrie, told ZDNet last year, Microsoft's shift to Linux and open source started over a decade ago when it open-sourced ASP.NET. "We recognized open source is something that every developer can benefit from. It's not nice, it's essential. It's not just code, it's community," explained Guthrie.

DC Universe, which started out as a streaming service for original DC superhero content, will in January become DC Universe Infinite, a supersized subscription service for DC Comics. CNET reports: The service launches on Jan. 21 for $7.99 per month, or $74.99 for a year-long subscription. DC says that subscribers will be able to read 24,000 comic book titles at launch, along with digital-first titles and access to exclusive fan events. Recently released titles featuring Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and other DC mainstays will make their way onto the platform in digital format six months after the physical copies arrive in stores. Those who subscribe during the initial preorder run will receive a $10 voucher to the DC Shop on Feb. 1 -- and make that $25 if you lock in a year-long subscription.

The move comes as DC nestles in with HBO, with original DC programming making a home on the HBO Max streaming service. A third season of the Harley Quinn animated series starring Kaley Cuoco was just announced for the platform earlier today, with all seasons of the show now sitting as an HBO exclusive. [...] To that end, DC is extending its offer for DC Universe subscribers to add HBO Max membership for $4.99 per month. Fans can jump on that deal through the end of October.

While developers have had access to beta versions of the software updates since June, many were caught off guard by Apple's much shorter notice of the final releases. By comparison, Apple started accepting apps built for iOS 13 on September 10 last year, over one week before the software update was released on September 19. From a story yesterday: "I think a lot of developers won't be sleeping tonight or will instead just give up and opt to release [their app] when they want to, instead of alongside the new OS," said iOS developer Shihab Mehboob in a message. "Apple has seemingly out of the blue decided to surprise developers with no real warning or care." [...] "Without advance warning like this, nothing is ready," a developer at High Caffeine Content, Steve Troughton-Smith, told me. "Developers aren't ready, the App Store is't ready, and everybody is rushing to react instead of having the chance to finish their apps properly." Steve ran through the normal iOS release process with me. Apple usually gives third-party app developers a heads up of about a week before the official public release of a new iOS. The company puts out a "Golden Master" copy of the new iOS and Xcode developer tool before the latest operating system is officially released to the public. This gives iPhone app developers the time they need to make sure the apps they've been building for the beta releases of the new iOS actually work on the final version. Sometimes there are critical bugs that are only revealed or could only be fixed at this point in the process.

The extra time can also be used to add new features for any new devices announced at the Apple Event. Apple's approval process for apps also takes some time, so developers have that week to make sure they submit in time to guarantee their work will be in the App Store for the iOS release. "Gone are the hopes of being on the store by the time users install the new iOS 14 and are looking for new apps. Gone is the chance to get some last-minute fixes into your existing apps to make sure they don't stop working outright by the time users get to upgrade their OS," explained Steve. "There are some developers who have spent all summer working on something new, using the latest technologies, hoping to be there on day one and participate in the excitement (and press coverage) of the new iOS," he continued. "For many of them, they'll be incredibly upset to have it end like this instead of a triumphant launch, and it can dramatically decrease the amount of coverage or sales they receive."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares Wikipedia's entry reminding us that this year's "Day of the Programmer" falls on September 13: The Day of the Programmer is an international professional day that is celebrated on the 256th (hexadecimal 100th, or the 2**8th) day of each year (September 13 during common years and on September 12 in leap years). It is officially recognized in Russia.

The number 256 (2**8) was chosen because it is the number of distinct values that can be represented with a byte, a value well known to programmers...

In China, the programmer's day is October 24, which has been established for many years. The date was chosen because it can also be written as 1024, which is equal to 210. It is also consistent regardless of leap years.
The original submission suggests we celebrate with "this delightful acoustic version of Code Monkey, which songwriter Jonathan Coulton describes as "how it feels to write software for a living."

But did any Slashdot readers even know today was The Day of the Programmer?

ZDNet reports: The International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) C++ group, Working Group 21 (WG21), has agreed upon the finalized version of 'C++20', the first major update to the 35 year-old programming language since C++17 from 2017... The 2020 release of C++ is huge by historical standards. Herb Sutter, a Microsoft engineer and long-time chair of WG21 C++ ISO committee, said it "will be C++'s largest release since C++11", meaning it's bigger than any of the past three releases, which happen every three years. It's also the first version that has been standardized....

Two of the most important features coming to C++20 are "modules" and "coroutines". Modules, which was led by Google's Richard Smith, stands in for header files and helps isolate the effects of macros while supporting larger builds. As Sutter noted recently, C++20 marks the "first time in about 35 years that C++ has added a new feature where users can define a named encapsulation boundary...."

Coroutines represents a generalization of a function. "Regular functions always start at the beginning and exit at the end, whereas coroutines can also suspend the execution to be resumed later at the point where they were left off," C++ contributors explain in a proposal for coroutines.
"We expect it to be formally published toward the end of 2020," Sutter said said in an announcement.

Interestingly, the year C++ was first released in 1985, Microsoft used it to build Windows 1.0, ZDNet points out. "These days Microsoft is exploring Mozilla-developed Rust to replace legacy Windows code written in C and C++ because of Rust's memory safety qualities."