Last week IEEE Spectrum released its 10th annual rankings of the Top Programming Languages. It choose a top language for each of three categories: actively used among typical IEEE members and working software engineers, in demand by employers, or "in the zeitgeist".

The results? This year, Python doesn't just remain No. 1 in our general "Spectrum" ranking — which is weighted to reflect the interests of the typical IEEE member — but it widens its lead.

Python's increased dominance appears to be largely at the expense of smaller, more specialized, languages. It has become the jack-of-all-trades language — and the master of some, such as AI, where powerful and extensive libraries make it ubiquitous. And although Moore's Law is winding down for high-end computing, low-end microcontrollers are still benefiting from performance gains, which means there's now enough computing power available on a US $0.70 CPU to make Python a contender in embedded development, despite the overhead of an interpreter. Python also looks to be solidifying its position for the long term: Many children and teens now program their first game or blink their first LED using Python. They can then move seamlessly into more advanced domains, and even get a job, with the same language.

But Python alone does not make a career. In our "Jobs" ranking, it is SQL that shines at No. 1. Ironically though, you're very unlikely to get a job as a pure SQL programmer. Instead, employers love, love, love, seeing SQL skills in tandem with some other language such as Java or C++. With today's distributed architectures, a lot of business-critical data live in SQL databases...

But don't let Python and SQL's rankings fool you: Programming is still far from becoming a monoculture. Java and the various C-like languages outweigh Python in their combined popularity, especially for high-performance or resource-sensitive tasks where that interpreter overhead of Python's is still too costly (although there are a number of attempts to make Python more competitive on that front). And there are software ecologies that are resistant to being absorbed into Python for other reasons.
The article cites the statistical analysis/visualization language R, as well as Fortran and Cobol, as languages that are hard to port code from or that have accumulated large already-validated codebases. But Python also remains at #1 in their third "Trending" category — with Java in second there and on the general "IEEE Spectrum" list.

JavaScript appears below Python and Java on all three lists. Java is immediately below them on the Trending and "Jobs" list, but two positions further down on the general "Spectrum" list (below C++ and C).

The metrics used for the calculation include the number of hits on Google, recent questions on Stack Overflow, tags on Discord, mentions in IEEE's library of journal articles and its CareerBuilder job site, and language use in starred GitHub repositories and number of new programming books.

Long-time Slashdot reader caseih writes: A thoughtful post on the Adafruit Blog chronicles the problems facing open-source hardware companies, and how more and more companies, including Sparkfun, Arduino and Prusa, are becoming more and more proprietary. In Arduino's case, they are deliberately trying to stamp out the clones undercutting them. The new Arduino Pro is not open source in any way, and the web site has now removed references to being an open source company.

As always there are subtleties and nuances. In the case of Prusa, not only are Chinese companies taking Prusa designs and source to make proprietary, closed-source products, they are also actively patenting designs and algorithms they've taken from open source.
The original submission ends with a question. "With Red Hat recently taking a step towards becoming a proprietary software company (which happens to use and work on open source projects) and now these reports, what are Slashdotters' thoughts on the future?

"Are truly open source companies doomed to failure, especially when overseas companies do not respect or even understand the principles of open source development?"

In a Substack post, Norm Sohl describes how he built a highly configurable machine out of open source hardware plans and the thermal guts of an Espresso Gaggia. An anonymous reader shares a summary from Ars Technica: Like many home espresso enthusiasts, Sohl had seen that his preferred machine, the Gaggia Classic Pro, could be modified in several ways, including adding a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller and other modifications to better control temperature, pressure, and shot volumes. Most intriguing to Sohl was Gaggiuino, a project that adds those things with the help of an Arduino Nano or STM32 Blackpill, a good deal of electrical work, and open software.

Sohl ended up creating a loose guide to making your own highly configurable machine out of common espresso machine parts and the Gaggiuino software. From his own machine, he salvaged a pump with a pressure sensor, a boiler with a temperature sensor, an overpressure valve, and brew head. Sohl made a chassis for his new machine out of extrusion rails and stiffening plates. The high-voltage boards and components were assembled breadboard style onto acrylic panels, held up by poster-tack adhesive. A 120-volt power connector was salvaged from a PC power supply, then mounted with a 3D-printed bracket. The low-voltage wires and parts were also tacked onto acrylic, individually crimped, and heat shrink-wrapped. And the control panel was 3D-printed, allowing for toggle switches and a touch-panel screen.

There's more work to be done on Sohl's unit; the exposed boiler and 120-volt wiring need to be hidden, and a drip tray would be nice. But it works. The first shot was fast and under-extracted, suggesting a finer grind and settings changes. Then again, that describes almost every first-time home espresso setup. Sohl writes that he hopes future versions of his project will make use of the Gaggiuino project's own circuit board design and that he'll have his 3D project files posted for sharing.

"The terms 'allowlist' and 'blocklist' describe their purpose, while the other words use metaphors to describe their purpose," reads a change description on the source code for Android -- from over a year ago. 9to5Mac calls it "a shortened version of Google's (internal-only) explanation" for terminology changes which are now becoming more widespread.

And Thursday GitHub's CEO said they were also "already working on" renaming the default branches of code from "master" to a more neutral term like "main," reports ZDNet: GitHub lending its backing to this movement effectively ensures the term will be removed across millions of projects, and effectively legitimizes the effort to clean up software terminology that started this month.

But, in reality, these efforts started years ago, in 2014, when the Drupal project first moved in to replace "master/slave" terminology with "primary/replica." Drupal's move was followed by the Python programming language, Chromium (the open source browser project at the base of Chrome), Microsoft's Roslyn .NET compiler, and the PostgreSQL and Redis database systems... The PHPUnit library and the Curl file download utility have stated their intention to replace blacklist/whitelist with neutral alternatives. Similarly, the OpenZFS file storage manager has also replaced its master/slave terms used for describing relations between storage environments with suitable replacements. Gabriel Csapo, a software engineer at LinkedIn, said on Twitter this week that he's also in the process of filing requests to update many of Microsoft's internal libraries.
A recent change description for the Go programming language says "There's been plenty of discussion on the usage of these terms in tech. I'm not trying to have yet another debate." It's clear that there are people who are hurt by them and who are made to feel unwelcome by their use due not to technical reasons but to their historical and social context. That's simply enough reason to replace them.

Anyway, allowlist and blocklist are more self-explanatory than whitelist and blacklist, so this change has negative cost.
That change was merged on June 9th -- but 9to5Mac reports it's just one of many places these changes are happening. "The Chrome team is beginning to eliminate even subtle forms of racism by moving away from terms like 'blacklist' and 'whitelist.' Google's Android team is now implementing a similar effort to replace the words 'blacklist' and 'whitelist.'" And ZDNet reports more open source projects are working on changing the name of their default Git repo from "master" to alternatives like main, default, primary, root, or another, including the OpenSSL encryption software library, automation software Ansible, Microsoft's PowerShell scripting language, the P5.js JavaScript library, and many others.

Slashdot reader and managing director of Adafruit, Phillip Torrone, a.k.a. ptorrone, writes: Tom's Hardware talked to Adafruit about what it's like to switch from selling tech to selling protective gear, and when hobbyists can expect things to return to normal. In March of 2020, Adafruit was deemed an essential service and business for critical manufacturing in NYC by executive order 202.6, making face shields and making/shipping critical components and electronics for COVID-19 related efforts and testing. "We've always needed to make essential electronics for people," Torrone said, stressing that this isn't new for them. "When this hit, there was a very specific short term need. And that was for face shields. And because we have 3D printers, we have laser cutters, we have production capabilities, [when] New York City put out the call, our name came up right away because that's one of the things we do."

On top of that, "we can make components for ventilators," Torrone added: "We can make components for the fast track FDA medical devices that people are trying to get out as fast as possible, from testing equipment to you name it, any type of temperature sensing or pressure sensing...We make electronic components that are used in many, many things. So no matter what, we would still need to be making those components for medical devices...electronics are electronics, so this temperature sensor that we used to use for other things, is going to be used for this now. This barometric pressure sensor, or that barometric pressure sensor [is going to be used for other things]...So for us, it was like 'Oh, this is just going in a different type of box for different types of application.'"

Since Adafruit's shift to essential medical and protective gear, the company's other products are now shipping out on a "when we can do it" basis. Tom's Hardware notes that the company "is still selling to select university and military researchers, but all others will have to wait until an unspecified time in the future to buy their usual Adafruit tech." Thankfully, Torrone says the customer response to the delay of normal business has been largely positive. "We've always been a good cause and a good business with a really good community. So our customers said, 'I'm still going to order and just ship it when you can.' So for regular orders for our customers, they've been fantastic."

Electronic component distributor Digi-Key will be producing a small manufacturing run of the "open hardware" ereader from the Open Book Project, reports Gizmodo: The raw hardware isn't as sleek or pretty as devices like the Kindle, but at the same time there's a certain appeal to the exposed circuit board which features brief descriptions of various components, ports, and connections etched right onto the board itself for those looking to tinker or upgrade the hardware. Users are encouraged to design their own enclosures for the Open Book if they prefer, either through 3D-printed cases made of plastic, or rustic wooden enclosures created using laser cutting machines. With a resolution of just 400x300 pixels on its monochromatic E Ink display, text on the Open Book won't look as pretty as it does on the Amazon Kindle Oasis which boasts a resolution of 1,680x1,264 pixels, but it should barely sip power from its built-in lithium-polymer rechargeable battery -- a key benefit of using electronic paper.

The open source ereader -- powered by an ARM Cortex M4 processor -- will also include a headphone jack for listening to audio books, a dedicated flash chip for storing language files with specific character sets, and even a microphone that leverages a TensorFlow-trained AI model to intelligently process voice commands so you can quietly mutter "next!" to turn the page instead of reaching for one of the ereader's physical buttons like a neanderthal. It can also be upgraded with additional functionality such as Bluetooth or wifi using Adafruit Feather expansion boards, but the most important feature is simply a microSD card slot allowing users to load whatever electronic text and ebook files they want. They won't have to be limited by what a giant corporation approves for its online book store, or be subject to price-fixing schemes which, for some reason, have still resulted in electronic files costing more than printed books.

The folks at SiFive have offered Brian Benchoff from Hackaday a look at the HiFive 1, the first hands-on with the first Open Hardware microcontroller. From the report: The design files for the HiFive 1 were made with Altium, a proprietary and non-Free software. Basically, the HiFive 1 is the SiFive FE310 microcontroller packaged in an Arduino Uno form factor. The pin spacing is just as stupid as it's always been, and there is support for a few Adafruit shields sitting around in the SDK. There are no analog pins, but there are two more PWM pins compared to the standard Arduino chip. The Arduino Uno and Leonardo have 32 kilobytes of Flash, while the HiFive 1 has sixteen Megabytes of Flash on an external SOIC chip. The HiFive 1 supports 3.3 and 5V I/O, thanks to three voltage level translators. The support for 5V logic is huge in my opinion -- nearly every dev board manufacturer has already written off 5V I/O as a victim of technological progress. The HiFive doesn't, even though the FE310 microcontroller is itself only 3.3V tolerant. It should be noted the addition of the voltage level translators add at least a dollar or two to the BOM, and double that to the final cost of the board. It's a nice touch, but there's room for cost cutting here. Other than that, the only other chip of note on the board is the FTDI FT2232HL, a well-supported but most certainly not Free and Open Source USB to UART chip. This is a two-port chip that provides programming, serial, and debug connections simultaneously. The folks at SiFive realize documentation and SDKs are necessary to turn a chip into a development board. To that end, they have a bare-metal SDK and support for the Arduino IDE. The board itself comes with a bootloader, and when you plug the HiFive 1 into a USB you get the equivalent of the Blink sketch from the Arduino. Yes, you too can have Open Source blinkies. What a magical time to be alive. Right now there are two methods of programming the HiFive 1. The Freedom E SDK, and the Arduino IDE. The Arduino IDE appears to be dependent on the Freedom E SDK, so either way, you'll have to get the SDK running. Right now, the SDK only works under Linux (and OS X, and possibly Cygwin), but support for Windows is coming. For Linux users, the getting started guide is more than sufficient, although it will take quite a while (at least 30 minutes) to build all the tools. Once the Freedom E SDK is installed, support for the Arduino IDE pretty much falls into place. You'll have to futz around with the Boards Manager, but with a few clicks, you get something fantastic. You can blink an LED with Open Source Hardware.

Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: Credential theft is one of the more persistent and troubling threats in security, and researchers have been trying to come up with answers to it for decades. A team at the University of Washington has developed a system that can prevent attackers from intercepting passwords and keys sent over the air by sending them through users' bodies instead. The human body is a good transmission mechanism for certain kinds of waves, and the UW researchers were looking for a way to take advantage of that fact to communicate authentication information from a user's phone directly to a target device, such as a door knob or medical device. In order to make that idea a reality, they needed to develop a system that could be in direct contact with the user's body, and could produce electromagnetic signals below 10 MHz. And to make the system usable for a mass audience, the team needed widely available hardware that could generate and transmit the signals. So the researchers settled on the fingerprint sensor on iPhones and the touchpad on Lenovo laptops, as well as a fingerprint scanner and a touchpad from Adafruit. The concept is deceptively simple: generate an electromagnetic signal from the fingerprint sensor or touchpad and transmit that through the user's body to the target device. The signal can carry a typical password or even an encryption key, the researchers said. "We show for the first time that commodity devices can be used to generate wireless data transmissions that are confined to the human body. Specifically, we show that commodity input devices such as fingerprint sensors and touchpads can be used to transmit information to only wireless receivers that are in contact with the body," the researchers, Mehrdad Hessar, Vikram Iyer, and Shyamnath Gollakota, of UW said in their paper, "Enabling On-Body Transmissions With Commodity Devices."

An anonymous reader writes: Partnering with Adafruit, Microsoft has announced the Windows IoT Core Starter Kit. The $75 kit comes comes with an SD card preloaded with Windows 10 IoT. According to the Raspberry Pi blog: "The pack is available with a Pi 2 for people who are are new to Raspberry Pi or who'd like a dedicated device for their projects, or without one for those who'll be using a Pi they already own. The box contains an SD card with Windows 10 Core and a case, power supply, wifi module and Ethernet cable for your Pi; a breadboard, jumper wires and components including LEDs, potentiometers and switches; and sensors for light, colour, temperature and pressure. There's everything you need to start building."

ptorrone writes: Adafruit is now shipping the USA-made open-source Arduinos. In celebration Ladyada the engineer posted an Arduino rotating in front of an American flag with the public domain "America the Beautiful" by the United States Navy Band as background music. Adafruit immediately received notice from from YouTube stating that the song is owned by Rumblefish. Rumblefish previously claimed to own copyright to ambient birdsongs, too.

ptorrone writes: Open source hardware pioneer and founder of Adafruit Limor "Ladyada" Fried sat down and interviewed the new CEO of MakerBot, Jonathan Jaglom. She asked some really tough questions had some suggestions for them, too, if they're going to turn things around. Discussed: Is there a desire for MakerBot to patch things up with the open source community? Jaglom wants to assure the 3D-printing community there are not any plans for filament DRM, and it was nice to hear him say "patents are not the way to win." Lastly, Fried suggested the open-sourcing of some specific elements of the MakerBot to get back to its open-source hardware roots.

Mark F. Brown and Joel Rozenweig build autonomous drones; that is, drones that don't need an operator every second. You tell the autonomous drone, "Pick up package # 941A at the loading dock and deliver it to 451 Bradbury St.' and off it goes. It's going to be a while yet before that happens, but one day....

Back in the present, dronemaking is still a hobby for Mark and Joel, something they do for fun after spending their workdays as software engineers at Intel. Joel says there is 'remarkably little' crossover between their jobs and their hobby, and that (so far) Intel has contributed little beyond some Edison modules (which you can buy for less than $50) and travel to the Embedded Linux Conference, where they gave a talk accompanied by these slides. NOTE: We have a little bonus for you today. We try to keep videos to 10 minutes or less, but we have no such constraints on transcript length. So if you want the 'full' version of this interview, please read the transcript.

An anonymous reader writes The MeArm is a flat-pack robot arm. It has been developed in a very short time frame as the creators have been able to tap into crowd development by open sourcing all of the designs. Because of this it's exploded around the world with builders on every continent (bar Antarctica) and there are even people manufacturing them to sell in Peru, Taiwan and South Africa. MeArm manufacture them in the UK and export to distributors around the world, including Open Source pioneers like Adafruit and Hackaday in the USA. They're currently running a Kickstarter for a controller to take it out of the 'Hackersphere' and into the living room. They doubled their target in the first week and are still going strong so it's looking like they will be the first consumer flat pack robot kit in the world! Controller or not, you can download the arm from Thingiverse, and follow the project at Hackaday.

coop0030 (263345) writes Adafruit held a 2014 Raspberry Pi Photography contest that has completed with the winners selected. You can see the winning photographs as well as all of the entries. Andrew Mulholland, using a Raspberry Pi powered LEGO panobot, is the winning photographer. He's also provided a video of how his winning photographs were put together.

From the Firepick website: 'We are developing a really cool robotic machine that is capable of assembling electronic circuit boards (it also 3D prints, and does some other stuff!). It uses a vacuum nozzle to pick really tiny resistors and computer chips up, and place them down very carefully on a printed circuit board.' There are lots of companies here and in China that will happily place and solder components on your printed circuit board, but hardly any that will do a one-off prototype or a small quantity. And the components have gotten small enough that this is really a job for a robot (or at least a Waldo), not human fingers. || There are obviously other devices on the market that do this, but Firepick Delta creator Neil Jansen says they are far too expensive for small companies, let alone individual makers.

The Firepick Delta Hackaday page talks about a $300 price for this machine. That may be too optimistic, but even if it ends up costing two or three times that amount, that's still a huge step forward for small-time inventors and custom manufacturers who need to populate just a few circuit boards, not thousands. They have a Haxlr8r pitch video, and have been noticed by TechCrunch, 3DPrintBoard.com, and Adafruit, just to name a few. Kickstarter? Not yet. Maybe next year. Open source? Totally, complete with GitHub repository. And they were at OSCON 2014, which is where Timothy found them. (Alternate Video Link)

coop0030 (263345) writes "Celebrate the 25th anniversary of the classic gaming device, Game Boy, by building your own with 3d printing and DIY electronics. This project uses a Raspberry Pi and TFT touch screen to make an epic DIY Game Girl. The 3d printed enclosure houses all of the components and can be printed in your favorite color. It's controlled with SNES gaming controller components, reusing the printed circuit board, buttons and elastomers. The 3D files can be found on Thingiverse, and a video of the finished product is provided as well."

coop0030 (263345) writes "Becky Stern at Adafruit has created a guide on how to create an open source NFC ring or other wearable to mod and unlock your Android phone. From the tutorial: 'Unlock your phone by just picking it up! No more pesky password or gesture PIN, just scan an NFC tag! This guide covers creating an NFC ring, putting an NFC tag in your nail polish, modding your Android installation to read tags from the lockscreen, and creating an automation toolchain to unlock the phone when the desired tag is scanned.' There is also a video that demonstrates how it works."

coop0030 (263345) writes "Noe & Pedro Ruiz at Adafruit have created a pair of open source near-eye video glasses combined with a Raspberry Pi. Their 3D Printed design turns a pair of 'private display glasses' into a "google glass"-like form factor. It easily clips to your prescription glasses, and can display any kind of device with Composite Video like a Raspberry Pi. They have a video demonstrating the glasses, a tutorial on how to build them, along with the 3d files required to print it out."

Arvydas Juskevicius (say that five times fast) is an independent software developer and hardware hacker based in London (which is where I got a chance to talk with him) who's decided to bring the useful LED signalling capabilities of many modern smartphones into the world of desktop or laptop computers. With his £10 BlinkStick kit (£15 pre-assembled), you get a programmable multi-color LED that's about the size of a flash memory key. Deceptively simple -- it's essentially one giant pixel, after all, which might not sound exciting when you have millions of them on a dense display surface. But that LED light is something you can use as a signal for alarms, or to tell you that you have a message from one app while another is at full-screen, or practically anything else that you can devise software to notice and react to. I get the sense that Juskevicius would prefer that people get the kit version, to help spur interest in actually soldering some hardware rather than just plugging it in. If you're allergic to paying in other than U.S. dollars, the BlinkStick is also available from Adafruit Industries. Watch the video below to see it in action.

With her signature pink hair, MIT engineer Limor Fried has become a force in the maker movement. Last year she was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur Magazine, and her company, Adafruit Industries, did $10 million in sales. Limor has agreed to take some time away from soldering and running a new company to answer your questions about hardware, electronics, and Adafruit. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.