Software Development

787 Articles

COBOL Isn’t The Issue: A Misinterpreted Crisis

April 20, 2020 by 144 Comments

Is history doomed to repeat itself? Or rather, is there really any doubt that it isn’t, considering recent events that made the news? I am of course talking about New Jersey’s call for COBOL programmers to fix their ancient unemployment system, collapsing under the application spikes caused by the COVID-19 lockdown. Soon after, other states joined in, and it becomes painfully apparent that we have learned absolutely nothing from Y2K: we still rely on the same old antiques running our infrastructure, and we still think people want to voluntarily write COBOL.

Or maybe they do? Following the calls for aid, things went strangely intense. IBM announced to offer free COBOL trainings and launched a forum where programmers can plug their skills and availability. The Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL programming course suddenly tops the list of trending GitHub projects, and Google Trends shows a massive peak for COBOL as well. COBOL is seemingly on its way to be one of the hottest languages of 2020, and it feels like it’s only a matter of time until we see some MicroCOBOL running on a Teensy.

However, the unemployment systems in question are unfortunately only a tiny selection of systems relying on decades old software, written in a language that went out of fashion a long time ago, which makes it difficult to find programmers in today’s times. Why is that?

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What Does GitHub’s Npm Acquisition Mean For Developers?

March 26, 2020 by 33 Comments

Microsoft’s open-source shopping spree has claimed another victim: npm. [Nat Friedman], CEO of GitHub (owned by Microsoft), announced the move recently on the GitHub blog.

So what motivated the acquisition, and what changes are we likely to see as a result of it? There are some obvious upsides and integrations, but these will be accompanied by the usual dose of skepticism from the open-source community. The company history and working culture of npm has also had its moments in the news, which may well have contributed to the current situation. This post aims to explore some of the rationale behind the acquisition, and what it’s likely to mean for developers in the future.

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GitHub On The Go

March 18, 2020 by 4 Comments

It is hard to find anyone that does any kind of software development that doesn’t have some interaction with GitHub. Even if you don’t host your own projects there, there are so many things to study and borrow on the site, that it is nearly ubiquitous. However, when you’ve needed GitHub on the run, you’ve probably had to turn to your phone browser and had a reduced experience. GitHub for Mobile is now out of beta and promises a more fluid phone-based GitHub experience.

In addition to working with tasks and issues, you can also review and merge pull requests. The app sends your phone notifications, too, which can be handy. As you might expect, you can get the app for Android or iPhone in the respective stores.

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Civilian RC Car Uses Lego NXT And Ada

March 14, 2020 by 4 Comments

Back in the last century, the US Department of Defense declared that Ada was going to be used everywhere and for everything. Books were published, schools build curriculum. Working programmers, however, filled out waivers to continue working in their languages of choice. As a result, only a little bit of safety-critical software really used Ada. However, we’ve noticed a bit of a resurgence lately. Case in point: an RC car using Ada for the brains. You can watch it tool around in the video below.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Ada in the past few months. Partially, this could be because of the availability of the GNU compiler, although that’s been around since 1995, so maybe there’s another explanation. Ada’s strong typing does tend to plug holes that hackers exploit, so while we would hate to say it is hack proof, it certainly is hack resistant compared to many popular languages.

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MessagePack Is A More Efficient JSON

March 12, 2020 by 50 Comments

It is an age-old problem, that of having some data you want to store somewhere, and later bring it back. How do you format the data? Custom file formats are not that hard, but if you use an existing format you can probably steal code from a library to help you. Common choices include XML or the simpler JSON. However, neither of these are very concise. That’s where MessagePack comes in.

For example, consider this simple JSON stanza:

{"compact":true, "schema":0}

This is easy to understand and weighs in at 27 bytes. Using MessagePack, you’d signal some special binary fields by using bytes >80 hex. Here’s the same thing using the MessagePack format:

 
0x82 0xA7 c o m p a c t 0xC3 0xA6 s c h e m a 0x00

Of course, the spaces are there for readability; they would not be in the actual data stream which is now 18 bytes. The 0x82 indicates a two-byte map. The 0xA7 introduces a 7-byte string. The “true” part of the map is the 0xC3. Then there’s a six-byte string (0xA6). Finally, there’s a zero byte indicating a zero.

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Reaching Serenity: Porting Git To A Homebrew Operating System

February 23, 2020 by 6 Comments

Life is all about the little joys — such as waking up in the morning and realizing there’s still plenty of time before you have to actually get up. Or getting up anyway to watch a delightful sunrise as the city slowly wakes up, or as [Andreas Kling] chose, porting your favorite development tool to the operating system you wrote.

With the aesthetics of ’90s UI design and the functionality of a simpler 2000s Unix-style system core in mind, and personal reasons to keep himself busy, [Andreas] started SerenityOS a little while back. Of course, writing your own operating system is always a great educational exercise, but it takes a certain amount of commitment to push it beyond an experimental playground phase. So ideally, you’d eventually want to use it as your actual main system, however, as software developer, [Andreas] was missing one crucial component for that: git. Well, he decided to change that and just port it — and as someone who likes to record his hacking sessions, you can watch him along the way.

Admittedly, watching someone tweaking some build tools and compiler settings would normally sound anything but overly exciting, but it adds a few more layers to it when doing so for a work-in-progress OS written from scratch — from digging into libc implementations to an almost reverse engineering approach to the build environment. If you take pleasure in people’s thought process in problem solving and (spoiler alert) their success, you will enjoy watching [Andreas]. On the other hand, if you’re more curious about a fresh approach at a desktop operating system, SerenityOS itself might be worth looking into. Of course, there are other options for that as well.

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GitHub Goes GUI-less

February 15, 2020 by 11 Comments

Git is a handy tool that many of us are using for more than just software development. Having a cloud-based upstream repository is also surprisingly useful, but until now using GitHub — the most common upstream server — meant firing up a web browser, at least for certain tasks. Now GitHub is releasing a beta version of command-line tools made to manipulate your GitHub repos.

The tools are early release so they mostly focus on issues and pull requests. Of course, git itself will do the normal things like clone and checkout — you’ve always been able to do that on the command line. The example given in the announcement blog post lists all issues with a help wanted label:

gh issue list --label "help wanted"

We noticed that asking to view the issue, while done on the command line, will still open a browser. The tools are still a little early, so this is an excellent time to let the developers know what you’d like or otherwise influence the project.

We were a little surprised it wouldn’t just consume git, so that you’d use the same commands for everything and it would just pass pre-formed commands to git. Of course, that would be pretty easy to write as a shell script wrapper if you were interested in such a thing.

You’d be forgiven for only thinking of git as a way to manage source code revisions, but it’s actually capable of all sorts of interesting tricks.