Plus an update on Rails 6, Intel's growing adoption of Rust, and the challenge of making breaking changes.

Links:

• Feedback: Academia and Industry — Do either of you have any insights as to how the software development community would view someone with a math PhD, but no industry coding experience as a job applicant? Any advice would be appreciated.
• Feedback: Absurd Abstractions — FYI about wanting `interface` in Python: they are called abstract base classes. Check out the standard library module, abc for that and collections.abc some useful predefined container interfaces.
• Feedback: Breaking Changes — I developed  a niche Python package that has some user following in the network security realm.  I’m at a crossroads though as a change I want to make will subtly break scripts that worked in previous/current versions.  The end result of my pending change  is good for the project but I fear I’ll ruin the workflow of my users.  Other than my github page I don’t know how to query/inform my users of this pending change.  What should I do?
• Ruby on Rails 6.0 Release Notes — Make Webpacker the default JavaScript compiler for Rails 6
• Intel and Rust: the Future of Systems Programming: Josh Triplett — Hear about how Intel is working to bring Rust to full parity with C, building the future of systems programming.
• Altruism Still Fuels the Web. Businesses Love to Exploit It | WIRED — The original well-meaning, geeky architects of the web believed that there was an abundance of altruism in human nature—and they were more correct on this count, it turns out, than many esteemed social philosophers were. But they were too optimistic in overlooking the possibility that corporations would exploit and colonize this new realm. If only we had all seen it coming.
• The Crystal Programming Language — Crystal is statically type checked, so any type errors will be caught early by the compiler rather than fail on runtime. Moreover, and to keep the language clean, Crystal has built-in type inference, so most type annotations are unneeded.
• The Imposter's Handbook by Rob Conery — You've had to learn on the job. New languages, new frameworks, new ways of doing things - a constant struggle just to stay current in the industry. This left no time to learn the foundational concepts and skills that come with a degree in Computer Science.

Plus your feedback, combining ruby and rust, and the latest scandal with JEDI.

Links:

• Emacs Feedback from DJ — Another point for the show is a soft intro to functional programming. Wes mentioned Emacs because of the packages supporting Clojure development when he started with that. Elisp seems to be fairly intuitive and well documented, as a little functional language its own right (correct me if I'm wrong)--this makes for a soft intro to FP. Most of my coding has been in the space of embedded systems and low-level languages--not much functional programming to be had. This show has gotten me curious about FP, which is quite old in concept, and getting implemented nicely in modern languages. For me, I still rely heavily on special Vim keys that are not mapped in evil-mode, which causes some paper cuts. However, elisp makes it easy to customize the desired UI functionality with very short programs/elisp statements in a config file. It's quite a refreshing exercise for someone like me.
• artichoke/artichoke: Artichoke is a Ruby made with Rust — Artichoke is a platform for building MRI-compatible Ruby implementations. Artichoke provides a Ruby runtime implemented in Rust that can be loaded into many VM backends.
• AP Sources: Boeing changing Max software to use 2 computers — Boeing is working on new software for the 737 Max that will use a second flight control computer to make the system more reliable, solving a problem that surfaced in June with the grounded jet, two people briefed on the matter said Friday.
• In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places - The New York Times — Experts thought the contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, known by the cinematic acronym JEDI, would go to Amazon Web Services, the dominant player in the field of cloud computing. They did not count on two developments: an extraordinarily aggressive public relations and lobbying campaign by Oracle, one of Amazon’s competitors, and the hostility of Mr. Trump to Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos.
• The Early History of F# (pdf)
• Use F# on Linux | The F# Software Foundation
• Ionide - Crossplatform F# Editor Tools — A Visual Studio Code package suite for cross platform F# development.
• The Problem With F# Evangelism — There seems to be a constant struggle to convince seasoned C# developers to give F# a try. Which is a pity because language and concepts deserve better.
• TopShell — Purely functional, reactive scripting language.

Plus gradual typing for Ruby, a new solution for Python packaging, and the real story behind Jony Ive's exit.

Links:

• Goroutines - Concurrency in Golang — Goroutines are functions or methods that run concurrently with other functions or methods. Goroutines can be thought of as light weight threads. The cost of creating a Goroutine is tiny when compared to a thread.
• Why build concurrency on the ideas of CSP? — One of the most successful models for providing high-level linguistic support for concurrency comes from Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes, or CSP. Occam and Erlang are two well known languages that stem from CSP. Go's concurrency primitives derive from a different part of the family tree whose main contribution is the powerful notion of channels as first class objects.
• Jony Ive ‘dispirited’ by Tim Cook’s lack of interest in product design — To many, Jony Ive’s announced departure from Apple last week felt very sudden. But a narrative is forming to suggest that he’s been slowly exiting for years as the company shifted priorities from product design to operations.
• CSP Paper
• A Tour of Go — These example programs demonstrate different aspects of Go. The programs in the tour are meant to be starting points for your own experimentation.
• GoLand: A Clever IDE to Go by JetBrains — GoLand is cross-platform IDE built specially for Go developers.
• Google I/O 2013 - Advanced Go Concurrency Patterns — Concurrency is the key to designing high performance network services. This talk expands on last year's popular Go Concurrency Patterns talk to dive deeper into Go's concurrency primitives, and see how tricky concurrency problems can be solved gracefully with simple Go code.
• Michael Dominick on Twitter — Ok, so this is cool I have a fully working #rails dev environment up under #Windows usign #WSL and @PengwinLinux. Using @code for the editor. So far so good!
• Pengwin by Whitewater Foundry — Pengwin is a Linux environment for Windows 10 built on work by Microsoft Research and the Debian project.
• Open-sourcing Sorbet — Sorbet is a fast, powerful type checker designed for Ruby. It scales to codebases with millions of lines of code and can be adopted incrementally.
• Sorbetting a gem, or the story of the first adoption — After reading about Brandon's first impression (highly recommend to check it out), I decided to give Sorbet a try and integrate it into one of my gems.
• Gradual typing of Ruby at Scale — This talk shares experience of Stripe successfully been building a typechecker for internal use, including core design decisions made in early days of the project and how they withstood reality of production use
• Building Standalone Python Applications with PyOxidizer — PyOxidizer's marquee feature is that it can produce a single file executable containing a fully-featured Python interpreter, its extensions, standard library, and your application's modules and resources. In other words, you can have a single .exe providing your application.
• Packaging Your Code — The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
• An Overview of Packaging for Python
• pex — pex is a library for generating .pex (Python EXecutable) files which are executable Python environments in the spirit of virtualenvs.
• shiv — shiv is a command line utility for building fully self-contained Python zipapps as outlined in PEP 441, but with all their dependencies included!

Plus Objective-C's return to grace, Mike’s big bet on .NET, and more!

Links:

• The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2019 — The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.
• Hello .Net Foundation - dominickm.com — I am pleased to share that I have joined the .Net Foundation.
• Avalonia: A multi-platform .NET UI framework — Avalonia is a WPF-inspired cross-platform XAML-based UI framework providing a flexible styling system and supporting a wide range of OSs: Windows (.NET Framework, .NET Core), Linux (GTK), MacOS, Android and iOS.
• Google’s Stadia looks like an early beta of the future of gaming — “The future of gaming is not a box,” according to Google. “It’s a place.” Just like how humans have built stadiums for sports over hundreds of years, Google believes it’s building a virtual stadium, aptly dubbed Stadia, for the future of games to be played anywhere.
• Stadia — Push the envelope of game development with Stadia.
• Rust is not a good C replacement | Drew DeVault’s Blog — The kitchen sink approach doesn’t work. Rust will eventually fail to the “jack of all trades, master of none” problem that C++ has. Wise languages designers start small and stay small. Wise systems programmers extend this philosophy to designing entire systems, and Rust is probably not going to be invited. I understand that many people, particularly those already enamored with Rust, won’t agree with much of this article. But now you know why we are still writing C, and hopefully you’ll stop bloody bothering us about it.
• Introduction to Python Development at Linux Academy — This course is designed to teach you how to program using Python. We'll cover the building blocks of the language, programming design fundamentals, how to use the standard library, third-party packages, and how to create Python projects. In the end, you should have a grasp of how to program.
• Marc-Etienne M.Léveillé on Twitter — Here's something interesting: the backdoor in ASUS Update Setup.exe is _again_ located in the CRT, just like the CCleaner case and recent games with a backdoor. This time in _crtExitProcess.

Plus a fresh reminder of Apple's absolute App Store authority, and the state of Mike's relationship with the rust compiler.

Links:

• RustPython: A Python Interpreter written in Rust
• Apple bans Facebook’s Research app that paid users for data
• Apple restores Google’s own internal iPhone apps after privacy brouhaha — For less than a day, Apple had briefly revoked Google’s iOS certificate that enabled those private apps to conduct various internal business such as company shuttles, food menus, as well as pre-release beta testing, and more.
• Apple Developer Enterprise Program — Get tools and resources to transform your mobile workforce with enterprise-class apps, distributed seamlessly and securely within your organization.
• Apple Is Fighting a Good Fight Against Facebook and Google — The implication that Apple is exhibiting some monopolistic urge to gutshot Facebook and Google makes close to zero sense. The events of this week will not affect their bottom lines, and Apple could have taken much more drastic action to lock down iOS — as it has before.
• Nilay Patel on Twitter — Hi, I'm the nagging voice in the back of your head pointing out that it's pretty intense that Apple can simply decide to prevent people from running code on their phones.
• Essential .NET - C# 8.0 and Nullable Reference Types — Nonetheless, as it currently stands, and even after 7 versions of C#, we still don’t have a perfect language.
• Make your next C# project non-nullable — The naming is a bit confusing, because reference types have always been nullable, and that’s the whole problem. The novelty is that they can now also be non-nullable.
• Switch to errors instead of warnings for nullable reference types in C# 8 — Nullable reference types coming in C# 8 are a great addition to anyone’s toolbox. But if you tried it you probably know “just” warnings are produced. And sometimes you’d like to have errors instead of warnings, so the build fails hard or something like that. It’s surprisingly easy to do so.

Links:

• Fortnite 15 Mil downloads sans Google Play
• Project Loom
• What Color is Your Function
• Generics in Go
• Elixir
• Clojure - Deps and CLI Guide
• Clojure - Getting Started
• Reitit, Data-Driven Routing with Clojure(Script)
• core.async Walkthrough
• Understanding Homoiconicity, the Power Behind Clojure Macros