Infographic: PHP vs. Python vs. Ruby. EU Advocate General: You Can't Copyright a Programming Language. In an opinion which, if affirmed by judges, would have dramatic impact on the definition of software and standards - at least in Europe if not eventually worldwide - the Advocate General in a European Court of Justice case involving U.S. -based business analytics firm SAS, has argued that the language in which computer programs are written may be exempt from copyright.
At issue: If you make a programming language that works like an existing one, have you violated copyright if you use a copyrighted manual as your guide? Have you violated copyright if you produce a manual that explains your language using terms that are similar to those in the manual you used as your guide? And finally, the big one: Is a work-alike programming language a violation of copyright in and of itself?
The case in question involves SAS's business process language, which a classical-style procedural language that financial and manufacturing institutions consider the modern-day successor to COBOL and PL/I. ProgrammableWeb - Mashups, APIs, and the Web as Platform. C#, Objective-C and JavaScript Move Up in TIOBE Index - ReadWriteCloud. GambleAware is set to shut down in a phased closure following the introduction of new gambling legislation in the United Kingdom. The charity has been in operation since 2002, working to raise awareness of gambling-related harm and to provide essential support to those in need.
The organization confirmed the end of its tenure in an official statement, which will see it succeeded by the appointment of three new commissioners, as well as the introduction of a new statutory levy to fund their work. Commissioners will be tasked to carry out work and development on research into gambling harm, prevention, and treatment measures. All of this comes after the long-awaited gambling reform policy was presented in May.
In its statement, the body indicated “the work historically delivered by GambleAware will now transition to the UK government and new commissioners across England, Scotland and Wales”, with the charity’s closure expected by March next year. Image credit: GambleAware. RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: CoffeeScript and Java Make Gains. Here's a tip: If you want to gain traction with developers, having a name that calls caffeine to mind may not be a bad thing. OK, that may not be why CoffeeScript and Java are making gains on GitHub and Stack Overflow according to RedMonk's February 2012 language rankings, but it probably doesn't hurt. RedMonk is using a ranking system developed by Drew Conway that pulls data from GitHub and Stack Overflow to gauge language popularity.
They first looked at this in September of last year and came up with four tiers of languages. In the first tier, you have the most popular languages like JavaScript, Java, C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby and shell scripts. The second tier has languages that are less widely used, but are still fairly popular like Clojure, CoffeeScript, Lisp (Emacs and Common, separately), Haskell, Lua, R, Scheme, Tcl and so on. The caveat that this applies to very specific communities is important. Changes Since 2011.