snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Andrew Glover provides an in-depth comparison of Engine Yard and Heroku, two cloud-based, platform-as-a-service offerings for Ruby development. 'To put it simply, Heroku will appeal more to developers and Engine Yard will appeal to operations folks. Consequently, when evaluating the two platforms, one's choice usually comes down to what's more important: Heroku's rapid deployment via a hands-off infrastructure, or Engine Yard's total control over all aspects of application deployment, provisioning, and monitoring.'"

itwbennett writes "A BBC article outlines a push to make software programming a basic course of study for British schoolchildren in hopes that Britain could become a major programming center for video games and special effects. Can earlier exposure to better technology courses reverse the declining enrollment in university computer science courses and make coding cool?"

AlexDomo writes to point out this statistical breakdown of the programming languages represented at StackOverflow. "Suprisingly, JavaScript turned out to be the most 'over-represented' language on StackOverflow, by quite a long way at 294% [where "a representation of 100% means that the SO tag count is aligned exactly with the TIOBE language index"]. Could this also be because programming JavaScript is generally quite difficult and will result in people seeking help more often? Following this was C# (which I had expected to be number 1), at 153%. After this, PHP, Ruby and Python were basically fairly balanced at around 100%. The most 'under-represented' major language would definitely be C at 11%. Three other major languages which seemed to be a bit under-represented, below 50%, were C++, Java and Objective-C. For details of the method used and the full results, refer to the original article." One of the attached comments makes an interesting point about the difficulty in divining meaning from such statistics, though.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees Microsoft's Project Roslyn potentially reinventing how we view compilers and compiled languages. 'Roslyn is a complete reengineering of Microsoft's .NET compiler toolchain in a new way, such that each phase of the code compilation process is exposed as a service that can be consumed by other applications,' McAllister writes. 'The most obvious advantage of this kind of "deconstructed" compiler is that it allows the entire compile-execute process to be invoked from within .NET applications. With the Roslyn technology, C# may still be a compiled language, but it effectively gains all the flexibility and expressiveness that dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby have to offer.'"

Doc Ruby writes "Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in MD, USA announced they've disrupted the means by which HIV stops the immune system from attacking it. From the article: 'Scientists say they have found a way to disarm the AIDS virus in research that could lead to a vaccine. Researchers have discovered that if they eliminate a cholesterol membrane surrounding the virus, HIV cannot disrupt communication among disease-fighting cells and the immune system returns to normal. [...] "By stealing cholesterol from the envelope of the virus, we can neutralize the subversion," said Graham. "We've broken the code; we can shut down the type of interference that HIV is having on the immune system."'"

In his first accepted submission, MaxShaw writes "repl.it is an online REPL that supports running code in 15+ languages, from Ruby to Scheme to QBasic, in the browser. It is intended as a tool for learning new languages and experimenting with code on the go. All the code is open sourced under the MIT license and available from GitHub." A few of the languages are supported by reusing existing "Foolang in Javascript" interpreters, but a number of them are built using Emscripten (previously used to build Doom for the browser). All evaluation occurs client side, but saved sessions are stored on their server.

eldavojohn writes "The Metasploit Framework has come a long way and currently allows just about anyone to configure and execute exploits effortlessly. Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide takes current documentation further and provides a valuable resource for people who are interested in security but don't have the time or money to take a training class on Metasploit. The highlights of the book rest on the examples provided to the reader as exercises in exploiting several older versions of operating systems like Windows XP and Ubuntu while at the same time avoiding triggering antivirus or detection. The only weak point of this book is that a couple chapters refer the reader to external texts (on stacks and registers) in order to meet requirements for crafting exploits. The book also gives the reader a brief warning on ethics as many of these exploits and techniques would most likely work on many sites and networks. If you're wondering how seemingly inexperienced groups like lulzsec constantly claim victims, this would be an excellent read." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

snydeq writes "Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto discusses the past, present, and future of the popular programming language, calling mobile the next target for Ruby: 'I'm currently working on an alternative subset or dialect of Ruby for the small devices. I'm going to make it public early next year. Of course, mobile computing is the way to go, so that's one of the reasons I focus on the Ruby dialect working on the smaller devices.'"

First time accepted submitter Mensa Babe writes "Oliver Morgan, the original author of the JavaScript Toolkit, or just 'The Toolkit' as it is known in the JavaScript community, has just announced the release of the long awaited version 1.1.0, with better documentation and added function support. Quoting the project documentation: '[JavaScript] Toolkit offers a large number of integrated methods and utilities to help enrich the javascript object library. Javascript was built originally for browsers and as such lacks a large number of data utility methods with are seen in languages such as Python and Ruby. However times have changed and JavaScript is being used more and more in backend platforms. JS Toolkit aims to bridge that gap and provide everyone a modern developer needs to produce fast, secure and tidy code quick and easily.' The Toolkit fully supports ECMAScript 5 and runs on the most important virtual machines that we have today, including Node.JS, V8, Rhino, RingoJS, and many others. It continues to be actively developed."

Michael J. Ross writes "For decades, programmers have written computer code in one language, and then programmatically translated that code into another, lower-level form (typically machine code that can be run directly by a microprocessor, or some sort of bytecode that can be interpreted by a virtual machine). For instance, source code written in C or C++ is compiled and assembled into machine code. In web programming, there are emerging languages and other tools for translating code into JavaScript. For instance, Google Web Toolkit allows the programmer to create web apps in Java. The latest addition to this category is CoffeeScript, a language that can be compiled into JavaScript, and is intended to reduce source code size and clutter by incorporating some of the best operators from other Web scripting languages, particularly Ruby. It is also the topic of a new tutorial, CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development." Read on to learn what Michael thinks of this book.

snydeq writes with an editorial in InfoWorld about the resurgence of native code. From the article: "Modern programmers have increasingly turned away from native compilation in favor of managed-code environments such as Java and .Net, which shield them from some of the drudgery of memory management and input validation. Others are willing to sacrifice some performance for the syntactic comforts of dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. But C++11 arrives at an interesting time. There's a growing sentiment that the pendulum may have swung too far away from native code, and it might be time for it to swing back in the other direction. Thus, C++ may have found itself some unlikely allies."

ProgramadorPerdido writes "I have been a developer for 25 years. I learned Basic, VB, C, FoxPro, Cobol, and Assembler, but the languages I used the most were Pascal and Delphi. I then concentrated on a now-non-mainstream language for 11 years, as it was used at work. One day I had the chance to move into Project Management and so I did for the last 2 years. Now, at almost 40 years old, I'm at a crossroad. On one side I realized developing is the thing I like best, while on the other side, the languages I'm most proficient with are not that hot on the market. So I came here looking for any advice on how to advance my career. Should I try to learn web development (html, xhtml, css, php, python, ruby)? Should I learn Java and/or C#? Or am I too old to learn and work a new language? Should I go back to PM work even if I do not like it that much? Any similar experiences?"

snydeq writes "InfoWorld takes a look at the rise of Git, the use of which has increased sixfold in the past three years. Buoyed in large part by interest among the Ruby community and younger developers, Git has been gaining share for open source development largely because of its distributed architecture, analysts note. And the version control system stands to gain further traction on Subversion in the years ahead, as Eclipse is making Git its preferred version control system, a move inspired by developers and members."

thundertron writes "I'm a 28-year-old, non-technical, UX-focused Product Manager at a startup. Overall I'm very happy with my work, but I'm endlessly frustrated that I'm not committing code. I love the few occasions where I commit some front-end code or put together a fairly sophisticated query, but if the onus were on me to put together an entire site my hands would be tied. I've thought about going back to school (or even taking time off from my career to take courses) in CS to immerse myself in programming. The flip side is that I know I won't want to do that forever — I won't want to be employed primarily as an engineer because I like too many other aspects of the business. My best option seems to be to dive into Ruby on Rails and just pick up what I can in my spare time. Perhaps others in the Slashdot community have some suggestions/recommendations?"

egalluzzo writes "Announced today, the AffirmIt! unit testing framework for Ruby eschews dismisses disses dispells the harsh, archaic notions of 'truth' and 'failure,' preferring instead to affirm your code. After all, who are they we Kelly the NRA to make value judgments about code that 'works' or 'doesn't work'? DHH announced earlier on Twitter that Rails plans to move to this new behavioral non-judgemental inclusive Wellesley evaluation framework in version 3.1."

eldavojohn writes "Test-Driven JavaScript Development by Christian Johansen is a book that thoroughly guides the user through some of the more advanced aspects of the JavaScript language and into Test-Driven Development (TDD). Throughout it, Johansen introduces great methods and utilities like libraries to accomplish all aspects of TDD in JavaScript. The book begins with Johansen demonstrating and teaching the reader some of the more advanced aspects of JavaScript to ensure that the following lessons in TDD are well understood. The best part of the book is in the last half where Johansen builds a chat client and server completely out of JavaScript using TDD right before the readers' eyes." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Java is performant, widely adopted and eminently portable, however, its syntax is largely inherited from C++ along with some of its esoteric unfriendliness. Mirah aims to place a friendly face on Java through the implementation of a syntax whose primary concern is developer friendliness (think Ruby/Python/Groovy), and route of least surprise. The result is a truly cogent alternative syntax delivering readability, expressiveness and some compelling new language features."

MassDosage writes "Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server written by David Smiley and Eric Pugh provides in-depth coverage of the open source Solr search server. In some ways this book reads like the missing reference manual for the advanced usage of Solr. It is aimed at readers already familiar with Solr and related search concepts as well as those having some knowledge of programming (specifically Java). The book covers a lot of ground, some of it fairly challenging, and gives those working with Solr a lot of hands-on technical advice on how to use and fine-tune many parts of this powerful application." Keep reading for the rest of MassDosage's review.

RedEaredSlider writes "The Smithsonian American Art Museum has featured everything pop culture from Dorothy's ruby red slippers to Seinfeld's puffy shirt. Now it will exhibit a history of video games. An exhibit called 'The Art of Video Games,' will open to the public in Washington, DC on March 16, 2012. The exhibit will explore the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies." They're currently holding a vote to determine which video games should represent their respective eras.

An anonymous reader writes "Ruby/RoR in NetBeans made headlines three years ago, but after Sun was acquired by Oracle there where fears that support for dynamic languages would suffer, as this IDE would be downsized. This has become a reality, since as of version 7, NetBeans will no longer support Ruby."