In Communication of the ACM, Google's VP of Education notes how calculators impacted math education — and wonders whether generative AI will have the same impact on CS education: Teachers had to find the right amount of long-hand arithmetic and mathematical problem solving for students to do, in order for them to have the "number sense" to be successful later in algebra and calculus. Too much focus on calculators diminished number sense. We have a similar situation in determining the 'code sense' required for students to be successful in this new realm of automated software engineering. It will take a few iterations to understand exactly what kind of praxis students need in this new era of LLMs to develop sufficient code sense, but now is the time to experiment."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes it's not the first time the Google executive has had to consider "iterating" curriculum: The CACM article echoes earlier comments Google's Education VP made in a featured talk called The Future of Computational Thinking at last year's Blockly Summit. (Blockly is the Google technology that powers drag-and-drop coding IDE's used for K-12 CS education, including Scratch and Code.org). Envisioning a world where AI generates code and humans proofread it, Johnson explained: "One can imagine a future where these generative coding systems become so reliable, so capable, and so secure that the amount of time doing low-level coding really decreases for both students and for professionals. So, we see a shift with students to focus more on reading and understanding and assessing generated code and less about actually writing it. [...] I don't anticipate that the need for understanding code is going to go away entirely right away [...] I think there will still be at least in the near term a need to understand read and understand code so that you can assess the reliabilities, the correctness of generated code. So, I think in the near term there's still going to be a need for that." In the following Q&A, Johnson is caught by surprise when asked whether there will even be a need for Blockly at all in the AI-driven world as described — and the Google VP concedes there may not be.

Rust's official survey team released results from their 8th annual survey "focused on gathering insights and feedback from Rust users". In terms of operating systems used by Rustaceans, the situation is very similar to the results from 2022, with Linux being the most popular choice of Rust users [69.7%], followed by macOS [33.5%] and Windows [31.9%], which have a very similar share of usage. Rust programmers target a diverse set of platforms with their Rust programs, even though the most popular target by far is still a Linux machine [85.4%]. We can see a slight uptick in users targeting WebAssembly [27.1%], embedded and mobile platforms, which speaks to the versatility of Rust.

We cannot of course forget the favourite topic of many programmers: which IDE (developer environment) do they use. Visual Studio Code still seems to be the most popular option [61.7%], with RustRover (which was released last year) also gaining some traction [16.4%].
The site ITPro spoke to James Governor, co-founder of the developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk, who said Rust's usage is "steadily increasing", pointing to its adoption among hyperscalers and cloud companies and in new infrastructure projects. "Rust is not crossing over yet as a general-purpose programming language, as Python did when it overtook Java, but it's seeing steady growth in adoption, which we expect to continue. It seems like a sustainable success story at this point."

But InfoWorld writes that "while the use of Rust language by professional programmers continues to grow, Rust users expressed concerns about the language becoming too complex and the low level of Rust usage in the tech industry." Among the 9,374 respondents who shared their main worries for the future of Rust, 43% were most concerned about Rust becoming too complex, a five percentage point increase from 2022; 42% were most concerned about low usage of Rust in the tech industry; and 32% were most concerned about Rust developers and maintainers not being properly supported, a six percentage point increase from 2022. Further, the percentage of respondents who were not at all concerned about the future of Rust fell, from 30% in 2022 to 18% in 2023.

Apple, in a blog post: We are delighted to announce the open source first release of Pkl (pronounced Pickle), a programming language for producing configuration. When thinking about configuration, it is common to think of static languages like JSON, YAML, or Property Lists. While these languages have their own merits, they tend to fall short when configuration grows in complexity. For example, their lack of expressivity means that code often gets repeated. Additionally, it can be easy to make configuration errors, because these formats do not provide any validation of their own. To address these shortcomings, sometimes formats get enhanced by ancillary tools that add special logic. For example, perhaps there's a need to make code more DRY, so a special property is introduced that understands how to resolve references, and merge objects together. Alternatively, there's a need to guard against validation errors, so some new way is created to validate a configuration value against an expected type. Before long, these formats almost become programming languages, but ones that are hard to understand and hard to write.

On the other end of the spectrum, a general-purpose language might be used instead. Languages like Kotlin, Ruby, or JavaScript become the basis for DSLs that generate configuration data. While these languages are tremendously powerful, they can be awkward to use for describing configuration, because they are not oriented around defining and validating data. Additionally, these DSLs tend to be tied to their own ecosystems. It is a hard sell to use a Kotlin DSL as the configuration layer for an application written in Go. We created Pkl because we think that configuration is best expressed as a blend between a static language and a general-purpose programming language. We want to take the best of both worlds; to provide a language that is declarative and simple to read and write, but enhanced with capabilities borrowed from general-purpose languages. When writing Pkl, you are able to use the language features you'd expect, like classes, functions, conditionals, and loops. You can build abstraction layers, and share code by creating packages and publishing them. Most importantly, you can use Pkl to meet many different types of configuration needs. It can be used to produce static configuration files in any format, or be embedded as a library into another application runtime.

We designed Pkl with three overarching goals:
To provide safety by catching validation errors before deployment.
To scale from simple to complex use-cases.
To be a joy to write, with our best-in-class IDE integrations.

After launching a limited beta test in July and a beta version for individual developers in September, GitHub's Copilot Chat chatbot feature is now generally available for all users. TechCrunch reports: As of today, Copilot Chat is available in the sidebar in Microsoft's IDEs, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio -- included as a part of GitHub Copilot paid tiers and free for verified teachers, students and maintainers of certain open source projects. Little else about Copilot Chat has changed since the beta. The chatbot's still powered by GPT-4, OpenAI's flagship generative AI model, fine-tuned specifically for dev scenarios. Developers can prompt Copilot Chat in natural language to get real-time guidance, for example asking Copilot Chat to explain concepts, detect vulnerabilities or write unit tests.

TechSpot remembers that Turbo Pascal "stands out as one of the first instances of an integrated development environment (IDE), providing a text-based interface through which developers could write their code, compile it, and finally link it with runtime libraries." The early IDE, written in Assembly, eschewed the use of floppies, instead building the code directly in RAM for an unprecedented performance boost.

The language demonstrated superior speed, greater convenience, and a more affordable price compared to its competition. Philippe Kahn, Borland's CEO who initially conceptualized turning the new language into an all-in-one product, decided to sell the software via mail orders for just $49.95, establishing a market presence for the then-newly founded company.
It was called "Turbo" because its use of RAM made it considerable faster, adds the Register: Anders Hejlsberg, who would later go on to join Microsoft as part of the C# project, is widely credited as creator of the language, with Borland boss Philippe Kahn identifying the need for the all-in-one tool...

Version 1 had limitations. Source code files, for example, were limited to 64 KB. It would only produce .COM executable files for DOS and CP/M — although other architectures and operating systems were supported. It would also run from a single floppy disk, saving users from endless swapping in a world where single drives were the norm and a hard disk seemed impossibly exotic — and expensive... However, it was with version 4, in 1987, that Turbo Pascal changed dramatically. For one, support for CP/M and CP/M-86 was dropped, and the compiler would generate .EXE executables under DOS, lifting the .COM restrictions...

For this writer, 1989's version 5.5 was peak Turbo Pascal. Object-oriented programming features turned up, including classes and inheritance, and a step-by-step debugger. Version 6 and 7 brought in inline assembly and support for the creation of Windows executables and DLLs respectively, but version 7 also marked the end of the line as far as Borland was concerned. Turbo Pascal for Windows would turn up, but was eventually superseded by Delphi.

However, the steamroller of tools such as Visual Basic 3 ensured that Borland never had the same success in Windows that it enjoyed under DOS. As for Turbo Pascal, several versions were eventually released by Borland as freeware including version 1 for DOS, 5.5, and 7.
I once took a computer programming course taught entirely in Pascal. (Functions, subroutines, and procedures...)

Any Slashdot readers have their own memories to share about Pascal?

Liam Proven reports via The Register: One of the best FOSS text editors for Windows, Notepad++, is turning 20, while cross platform Geany just hit version 2.0 as it turns 18 years old. Notepad++'s version 8.6 is the twentieth anniversary release of one of the go-to FOSS text editors for Windows. [...] If you use an Arm-powered Windows machine, such as the ThinkPad X13S, there is now a native Arm64 version. It still supports x86-32 as well, and there are portable versions which work without being installed locally -- handy if you don't have admin rights. There is even a usefully recent version for Windows XP if you are still using that geriatric OS. This release adds multi-select, allowing you to manipulate multiple instances of the same text at once, which looks confusing but very powerful.

It is a staple on all of the Reg FOSS desk's Windows partitions, thanks to its inclusion in the essential Windows post-install setup tool Ninite. Ninite will install -- and update -- a whole swath of FOSS and freeware tools for Windows, making setup of a new machine doable in just a couple of clicks. And if you keep the Ninite installer file around, you can re-run it later and it will update everything it installed first time around. Ninite does offer other programmers' editors, such as Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio Code -- but they are behemoths by comparison. VSCode is implemented as an Electron app, meaning that it's huge, embeds an entire copy of Chromium, and scoffs RAM like it's going out of fashion. Notepad++ is a native Win32 app, making it tiny and fast: the download is less than 5MB, one twentieth the size of VSCode.

Sluggish, bloated editors are not just a problem on Windows. Gargantuan Electron apps are distressingly prevalent on Linux and macOS as well. This vulture is guilty of using some, and even recommending them -- because some of them can do things that nothing else can. That's not true in the case of plain text editors, though. You don't have to put up with apps that take a good fraction of a gigabyte for this. Geany is a good example. It straddles the line between a text editor and an IDE: it can manage multi-project files, automatically call out to compilers and suchlike, and parse their output to highlight errors. We last mentioned it nearly a decade ago but the project recently reached voting age -- at least for humans -- and after this milestone in maturity its developers called the latest release version 2.0. It has better support for dark mode, a new tree view in its sidebar, adds a bunch of new supported file types, and can detect if the user changes the type of a file and re-do its syntax highlighting to match.

Computer science teachers around the globe have been left scrambling to find an alternative IDE for their students, after Replit announced it was shuttering its Teams for Education plan. From a report: "To focus on improving the Replit experience for all users, we have made the difficult decision to deprecate Teams for Edu ... Teams for Edu will no longer receive new features or bug fixes, and we will suspend the creation of new Teams and Orgs," a statement from Replit, shared with educators and brought to our attention on Monday by Reg readers, declared last week. The platform provided a collaborative integrated development environment (IDE) tailored toward classrooms. It allowed students to work together on projects at the same time, similar to Google Docs, as well as automating code evaluation to streamline assessments carried out by teachers.

The decision has sparked frustration among many educators who'd invested heavily in the platform since Replit made the plan available for free in early 2022. "Computer science teachers in the last 48 hours have had to scramble to try to find alternatives as soon as possible and it will be the students that suffer," a teacher based in Asia-Pacific told The Register. "Replit was the only organization we are aware of providing online coding with instant assessment and so it was a hugely popular choice with computer science teachers." In a Xeet last week, CEO Amjad Masad acknowledged the pain the decision to shut down Teams for Education was likely to cause, but said the current system had become economically nonviable.

This week GitHub announced the approaching general availability of the GPT-4-powered GitHub Copilot Chat in December "as part of your existing GitHub Copilot subscription" (and "available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects.")

And this "code-aware guidance and code generation" will also be integrated directly into github.com, "so developers can dig into code, pull requests, documentation, and general coding questions with Copilot Chat providing suggestions, summaries, analysis, and answers." With GitHub Copilot Chat we're enabling the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language for every developer on the planet. Whether it's finding an error, writing unit tests, or helping debug code, Copilot Chat is your AI companion through it all, allowing you to write and understand code using whatever language you speak...

Copilot Chat uses your code as context, and is able to explain complex concepts, suggest code based on your open files and windows, help detect security vulnerabilities, and help with finding and fixing errors in code, terminal, and debugger...

With the new inline Copilot Chat, developers can chat about specific lines of code, directly within the flow of their code and editor.
InfoWorld notes it will chat in "whatever language a developer speaks." (And that Copilot Chat will also be available in GitHub's mobile app.) But why wait until December? GitHub's blog post says that Copilot Chat "will come to the JetBrains suite of IDEs, available in preview today."

GitHub also plans to introduce "slash commands and context variables" for GitHub Copilot, "so fixing or improving code is as simple as entering /fix and generating tests now starts with /tests."

"With Copilot in the code editor, in the CLI, and now Copilot Chat on github.com and in our mobile app, we are making Copilot ubiquitous throughout the software development lifecycle and always available in all of GitHub's surface areas..."

CNBC adds that "Microsoft-owned GitHub" also plans to introduce "a more expensive Copilot assistant" in February "for developers inside companies that can explain and provide recommendations about internal source code."

Wednesday's blog post announcing these updates was written by GitHub's CEO, who seemed to be predicting an evolutionary leap into a new future. "Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot." He promised they'd built on their vision of a future "where AI infuses every step of the developer lifecycle." Open source and Git have fundamentally transformed how we build software. It is now evident that AI is ushering in the same sweeping change, and at an exponential pace... We are certain this foundational transformation of the GitHub platform, and categorically new way of software development, is necessary in a world dependent on software. Every day, the world's developers balance an unsustainable demand to both modernize the legacy code of yesterday and build our digital tomorrow. It is our guiding conviction to make it easier for developers to do it all, from the creative spark to the commit, pull request, code review, and deploy — and to do it all with GitHub Copilot deeply integrated into the developer experience.
And if you're worried about the security of AI-generated code... Today, GitHub Copilot applies an LLM-based vulnerability prevention system that blocks insecure coding patterns in real-time to make GitHub Copilot's suggestions more secure. Our model targets the most common vulnerable coding patterns, including hardcoded credentials, SQL injections, and path injections. GitHub Copilot Chat can also help identify security vulnerabilities in the IDE, explain the mechanics of a vulnerability with its natural language capabilities, and suggest a specific fix for the highlighted code.
But for Enterprise accounts paying for GitHub Advanced Security, there's also an upgrade coming: "new AI-powered application security testing features designed to detect and remediate vulnerabilities and secrets in your code." (It's already available in preview mode.)

GitHub even announced plans for a new AI assistant in 2024 that generates a step-by-step plan for responding to GitHub issues. (GitHub describes it as "like a pair programming session with a partner that knows about every inch of the project, and can follow your lead to make repository-wide changes from the issue to the pull request with the power of AI.")

CNBC notes that AI-powered coding assistants "are still nascent, though, with less than 10% enterprise adoption, according to Gartner, a technology industry research firm."

But last month Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts GitHub Copilot already had one million paying users...

And GitHub's blog post concludes, "And we're just getting started."

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: JetBrains is previewing a dedicated IDE for the Rust programming language, called RustRover, which combines coding assistance with an integrated Rust toolchain. Available in preview September 13, RustRover is positioned to simplify the Rust coding experience while "unlocking the language's full potential," JetBrains said. Capabilities include real-time feedback, code suggestions, simplified toolchain management, and team collaboration.

Previously, JetBrains offered IntelliJ Rust, an open source Rust plugin for IntelliJ IDEs. But with RustRover, the company aims to provide a dedicated product with enhanced functionality for the growing Rust developer community. JetBrains also has been previewing a multi-language editor and IDE, called JetBrains Fleet, that supports Rust development...

RustRover will have some similarities to JetBrains' other language-specific IDEs including PyCharm for Python, GoLand for Go, and RubyMine for Ruby.
RustRover integrates with version control systems, supporting GitHub and Git.

An anonymous reader writes: A Guangdong-based state-backed enterprise in charge of e-government projects in the Southern Chinese province has apologized after admitting that its "home-developed" software was based on open-source code from US tech giant Microsoft. Digital Guangdong, known as DigitalGD, published an apology last week after it was revealed that its CEC-IDE software application, which helps programmers write code, was based on Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code), with just minor modifications and certain functions added.

VS Code is available under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology licence, a permissive open source licence allowing for reuse even for commercial purposes. DigitalGD said this fact was not disclosed due to "negligence," and admitted that its description of its software as "self-developed" has met scrutiny and doubt from Chinese programmers. "We are deeply sorry and humiliated for this, and relevant teams have been ordered to make rectifications," the company said. "Chinese authorities have repeatedly demanded 'safe and controllable' hardware and software for key infrastructure, rewarding businesses for indigenous innovations, but this has motivated some companies to make false claims about their products," notes the South China Morning Post.

A similar incident happened in May when a Shenzhen-based Powerleader announced a "home developed" Powerstar P3-01105 CPU that was later revealed to be Intel's Core i3-10105 Comet Lake CPU.

Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac, committing to security updates and platform update compatibility for the next 12 months. 9to5Mac reports: "With today's announcement, we're redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, optimizing them for cross-platform development," the company said in the announcement. "No new framework, runtime, or language support will be added to Visual Studio for Mac." The company added: "We will also continue to provide runtime and workload updates so you can continue building and shipping applications built on .NET 6, .NET 7, and the Mono frameworks. While not officially supported, we've also enabled rudimentary support for .NET 8 in Visual Studio for Mac for building and debugging applications."

Once the wheels fall off Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac or in the cloud. Otherwise, Microsoft points to cross-platform compatible developer technology that will run on macOS: "The recently announced C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI, and Unity Extensions for VS Code are available in preview and are intended to augment VS Code's capabilities for .NET and C# developers. These extensions operate natively across all supported platforms, including macOS, and the experience using these will continue to be improved as they move from preview to GA and beyond."

"Stack Overflow is adding artificial intelligence to its offerings," reports ZDNet (which notes traffic to the Q&A site has dropped 5% in the last year).

So in a video, Stack Overflow's CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says that search and question-asking "will evolve to provide you with instant summarized solutions with citations to sources, aggregated by generative AI — plus the option to ask follow-up questions in a chat-like format."

The New Stack provides some context: As computer scientist Santiago Valdarrama remarked in a tweet, "I don't remember the last time I visited Stack Overflow. Why would I when tools like Copilot and ChatGPT answer my questions faster without making me feel bad for asking?" It's a problem Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar acknowledges because, well, he encountered it too.

"When I first started using Stack Overflow, I remember my first experience was quite harsh, because I basically asked a fairly simple question, but the standard on the website is pretty high," Chandrasekar told The New Stack. "When ChatGPT came out, it was a lot easier for people to go and ask ChatGPT without anybody watching...."

But what may be of more interest to developers is that Stack Overflow is now offering an IDE (integrated development environment) extension for Visual Studio Code that will be powered by OverflowAI. This means that coders will be able to ask a conversational interface a question and find solutions from within the IDE.

Stack Overflow also is launching a GenAI Stack Exchange, where the community can post and share knowledge on prompt engineering, getting the most out of AI and similar topics.
And they're integrating it into other workflows as well. "Of course, AI isn't replacing humans any time soon," CEO Chandrasekar says in the video. "But it can help you draft a question to pose to our community..."

Signups for the OverflowAI preview are available now. "With your help, we'll be putting AI to work," CEO Chandrasekar says in the video.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register: ChatGPT, OpenAI's fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a [pre-print] study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants.

The Purdue team analyzed ChatGPT's answers to 517 Stack Overflow questions to assess the correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and conciseness of ChatGPT's answers. The U.S. academics also conducted linguistic and sentiment analysis of the answers, and questioned a dozen volunteer participants on the results generated by the model. "Our analysis shows that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers are incorrect and 77 percent are verbose," the team's paper concluded. "Nonetheless, ChatGPT answers are still preferred 39.34 percent of the time due to their comprehensiveness and well-articulated language style." Among the set of preferred ChatGPT answers, 77 percent were wrong...

"During our study, we observed that only when the error in the ChatGPT answer is obvious, users can identify the error," their paper stated. "However, when the error is not readily verifiable or requires external IDE or documentation, users often fail to identify the incorrectness or underestimate the degree of error in the answer." Even when the answer has a glaring error, the paper stated, two out of the 12 participants still marked the response preferred. The paper attributes this to ChatGPT's pleasant, authoritative style.

"From semi-structured interviews, it is apparent that polite language, articulated and text-book style answers, comprehensiveness, and affiliation in answers make completely wrong answers seem correct," the paper explained.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google today announced the launch of Project IDX, its foray into offering an AI-enabled browser-based development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps. It currently supports frameworks like Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte and Vue, and languages like JavaScript and Dart, with support for Python, Go and others in the works. Google did not build a new IDE (integrated development environment) when it created IDX. Instead, it is using Visual Studio Code -- Open Source as the basis of its project. This surely allowed the team to focus on the integration with Codey, Google's PaLM 2-based foundation model for programming tasks. Thanks to Codey, IDX supports smart code completion, a ChatGPT/Bard-like chatbot that can help developers with general coding questions as well as those related specifically to the code you are working on (including the ability to explain it) and the ability to add contextual code actions like "add comments."

"We spend a lot of time writing code, and recent advances in AI have created big opportunities to make that time more productive," the IDX team explains in today's announcement. "With Project IDX, we're exploring how Google's innovations in AI -- including the Codey and PaLM 2 models powering Studio Bot in Android Studio, Duet in Google Cloud and more -- can help you not only write code faster, but also write higher-quality code." As a cloud-based IDE, it's no surprise that Project IDX integrates with Google's own Firebase Hosting (and Google Cloud Functions) and allows developers to bring in existing code from the GitHub repository. Every workspace has access to a Linux-based VM (virtual machine) and, soon, embedded Android and iOS simulators right in the browser.

Google is adding a smorgasbord of new features to its AI chatbot Bard, including support for new languages (Japanese and Korean), easier ways to export text to Google Docs and Gmail, visual search, and a dark mode. Most significantly, the company is removing the waitlist for Bard and making the system available in English in 180 countries and territories. From a report: It's also promising future features like AI image generation powered by Adobe and integration with third-party web services like Instacart and OpenTable. Collectively, the news is a shot in the arm for Bard, which was released two months ago for select users in the US and UK. The chatbot -- which Google still stresses is an experiment and not a replacement to its search engine -- has compared poorly to rivals like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's new Bing chatbot. Notably, Bard made a factual error in its first-ever public demo (though this problem is common to all such bots). Now, Google is adding a lot of new features as well as upgrading Bard to use its new PaLM 2 language model. This should improve its general answers and usability.

Google says the upgraded Bard is particularly good at tackling coding queries, including debugging and explaining chunks of code in more than 20 languages, so some of today's upgrades are focused on this use case. These include the new dark mode, improved citations for code (which will not only offer sources but also explain the snippets), and a new export button. This can already be used to send code to Google's Colab platform but will now also work with another browser-based IDE, Replit (starting with Python queries).

Amazon is making its AI-powered coding assistant CodeWhisperer free for individual developers, reports the Verge, "undercutting the $10 per month pricing of its Microsoft-made rival." Amazon launched CodeWhisperer as a preview last year, which developers can use within various integrated development environments (IDEs), like Visual Studio Code, to generate lines of code based on a text-based prompt....

CodeWhisperer automatically filters out any code suggestions that are potentially biased or unfair and flags any code that's similar to open-source training data. It also comes with security scanning features that can identify vulnerabilities within a developer's code, while providing suggestions to help close any security gaps it uncovers. CodeWhisperer now supports several languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#, including Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala.
Here's how Amazon's senior developer advocate pitched the usefulness of their "real-time AI coding companion": Helping to keep developers in their flow is increasingly important as, facing increasing time pressure to get their work done, developers are often forced to break that flow to turn to an internet search, sites such as StackOverflow, or their colleagues for help in completing tasks. While this can help them obtain the starter code they need, it's disruptive as they've had to leave their IDE environment to search or ask questions in a forum or find and ask a colleague — further adding to the disruption. Instead, CodeWhisperer meets developers where they are most productive, providing recommendations in real time as they write code or comments in their IDE. During the preview we ran a productivity challenge, and participants who used CodeWhisperer were 27% more likely to complete tasks successfully and did so an average of 57% faster than those who didn't use CodeWhisperer....

It provides additional data for suggestions — for example, the repository URL and license — when code similar to training data is generated, helping lower the risk of using the code and enabling developers to reuse it with confidence.

At its re:Mars conference, Amazon today announced the launch of CodeWhisperer, an AI pair programming tool similar to GitHub's Copilot that can autocomplete entire functions based on only a comment or a few keystrokes. From a report: The company trained the system, which currently supports Java, JavaScript and Python, on billions of lines of publicly available open-source code and its own codebase, as well as publicly available documentation and code on public forums. It's now available in preview as part of the AWS IDE Toolkit, which means developers can immediately use it right inside their preferred IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm and Amazon's own AWS Cloud 9. Support for the AWS Lambda Console is also coming soon. Ahead of today's announcement, Vasi Philomin, Amazon's VP in charge of its AI services, stressed that the company didn't simply create this in order to offer a copy of Copilot. He noted that with CodeGuru, its AI code reviewer and performance profiler, and DevOps Guru, its tool for finding operation issues, the company laid the groundwork for today's launch quite a few years ago.

Microsoft Dev Box is intended to simplify the process of getting new developer workstations up and running quickly, with all necessary tools and dependencies installed and working out-of-the-box (so to speak), along with access to up-to-date source code and fresh copies of any nightly builds. Ars Technica reports: Dev Box is built on Windows 365, a service that IT admins can use to provide preconfigured virtual PCs to users. Admins can build operating system images and offer hardware configurations with different amounts of CPU power, storage, and RAM based on what particular users (or workloads) need. Windows 365 virtual machines, including but not limited to Dev Box VMs, can be accessed from other Windows PCs, or devices running macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, or ChromeOS.

"Microsoft Dev Box supports any developer IDE, SDK, or internal tool that runs on Windows," writes Microsoft product manager Anthony Cangialosi [in a blog post introducing the service]. "Dev Boxes can target any development workload you can build from a Windows desktop and are particularly well-suited for desktop, mobile, IoT, and gaming. You can even build cross-platform apps using Windows Subsystem for Linux." Dev Box is currently available in a private preview. If you're interested in testing it when the preview goes public, you can sign up to learn more here.

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: With the release of the A500 mini (which also supports A1200 games) and its side loading feature you may be interested to get started with Amiga Retro games development. This is why I collected some recent Amiga games development tutorials and added some additional information.

A popular game programming language on the Amiga is Blitz BASIC or AmiBlitz as the freely available and open source version is called now. The latest version (v 3.9.2) was recently released. The best known game developed with Blitz Basic is Team 17's original Worms game for the Amiga 500 in 1995. Meanwhile the Worms franchise has sold over 75 million game units across many different platforms. Daedalus2097 has just started an AmiBlitz video tutorial series on Twitch.tv: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. An example AmiBlitz game currently under development is Super Metal Hero (A1200) and here's a shooter level in the game.

REDPILL is a 2D game creation tool written in AmiBlitz by Carlos Peris and is designed to empower people to create many games for Amiga without programming knowledge. It's still early days but the first games are already being designed using this tool. An example game designed with this tool is Guardian — The legend of flaming sword.

The "Scorpion Engine" developed by Erik 'Earok' Hogan is a closed source game engine with all software developed for it open source. It offers a modern Windows IDE for development. In this video, Erik Hogan guides Micheal Parent from Bitbeam Cannon step by step as they create a legit retro video game from scratch. Various new games have and are being developed using this engine. An already released game is Amigo the Fox and an example game under development is Rick Dangerous (A1200 version).

If you want to dig deeper into Amiga coding then here's a series of Assembly game development tutorials by Phaze101. An example game currently being written in assembler is RESHOOT PROXIMA 3 (A1200).

If you are unexperienced with coding but would like to then here are some Amos (BASIC) tutorials for you: Rob Smith's How to program Wordle in AMOS on the AMIGA and Lets Code Santa's Present Drop Game.

The Git team has issued an update to fix a bug in Git for Windows that "affects multi-user hardware where untrusted parties have write access to the same hard disk," reports The Register. Specifically, the update is concerned with CVE-2022-24765. From the report: Arguably, if an "untrusted party" has write access to a hard disk, then all bets are off when it comes to the nooks and crannies of a PC anyway. In this case, the miscreants would only need to create the folder c:\.git, "which would be picked up by Git operations run supposedly outside a repository while searching for a Git directory," according to NIST. The result is that Git would use the config in the directory.

NIST went on to list potentially vulnerable products, which included Visual Studio. "Users of the Microsoft fork of Git are vulnerable simply by starting a Git Bash." The Git team was little blunter about the vulnerability, and warned that "Merely having a Git-aware prompt that runs 'git status' (or 'git diff') and navigating to a directory which is supposedly not a Git worktree, or opening such a directory in an editor or IDE such as VS Code or Atom, will potentially run commands defined by that other user." [...] To deal with the issue, the Git team recommends an update. Alternatively, a user could create that .git folder themselves and remove read/write access as workaround or "define or extend 'GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES' to cover the parent directory of the user profile," according to NIST.