fidzu : computers

For a quarter century, the TIOBE Index has attempted to rank the popularity of programming languages by the number of search engine results they bring up - and this week they had an announcement. Over the last year the language showing the largest increase in its share of TIOBE's results was C#. TIOBE founder/CEO Paul Jansen looks back at how C++ evolved: From a language-design perspective, C# has often been an early adopter of new trends among mainstream languages. At the same time, it successfully made two major paradigm shifts: from Windows-only to cross-platform, and from Microsoft-owned to open source. C# has consistently evolved at the right moment. For many years now, there has been a direct battle between Java and C# for dominance in the business software market. I always assumed Java would eventually prevail, but after all this time the contest remains undecided. It is an open question whether Java - with its verbose, boilerplate-heavy style and Oracle ownership - can continue to keep C# at bay. While C# remains stuck in the same #5 position it was in a year ago, its share of TIOBE's results rose 2.94% - the largest increase of the 100 languages in their rankngs. But TIOBE's CEO notes that his rankings for the top 10 highest-scoring languages delivered "some interesting movements" in 2025: C and C++ swapped positions. [C rose to the #2 position - behind Python - while C++ dropped from #2 to the #4 rank that C held in January of 2025]. Although C++ is evolving faster than ever, some of its more radical changes - such as the modules concept - have yet to see widespread industry adoption. Meanwhile, C remains simple, fast, and extremely well suited to the ever-growing market of small embedded systems. Even Rust has struggled to penetrate this space, despite reaching an all-time high of position #13 this month. So who were the other winners of 2025, besides C#? Perl made a surprising comeback, jumping from position #32 to #11 and re-entering the top 20. Another language returning to the top 10 is R, driven largely by continued growth in data science and statistical computing. Of course, where there are winners, there are also losers. Go appears to have permanently lost its place in the top 10 during 2025. The same seems true for Ruby, which fell out of the top 20 and is unlikely to return anytime soon. What can we expect from 2026? I have a long history of making incorrect predictions, but I suspect that TypeScript will finally break into the top 20. Additionally, Zig, which climbed from position #61 to #42 in 2025, looks like a strong candidate to enter the TIOBE top 30. Here's how TIOBE estimated the 10 most popularity programming languages at the end of 2025 PythonCJavaC++C#JavaScriptVisual BasicSQLDelphi/Object PascalR

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11 Jan 2026 8:34am GMT

"We will make the new ð algorithm...open source in 7 days," Elon Musk posted Saturday on X.com. Musk says this is "including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users," and "This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed." Some context from Engadget: Musk has been making promises of open-sourcing the algorithm since his takeover of Twitter, and in 2023 published the code for the site's "For You" feed on GitHub. But the code wasn't all that revealing, leaving out key details, according to analyses at the time. And it hasn't been kept up to date. Bloomberg also reported on Saturday's announcement: The billionaire didn't say why X was making its algorithm open source. He and the company have clashed several times with regulators over content being shown to users. Some X users had previously complained that they were receiving fewer posts on the social media platform from people they follow. In October, Musk confirmed in a post on X that the company had found a "significant bug" in the platform's "For You" algorithm and pledged a fix. The company has also been working to incorporate more artificial intelligence into its recommendation algorithm for X, using Grok, Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot... In September, Musk wrote that the goal was for X's recommendation engine to "be purely AI" and that the company would share its open source algorithm about every two weeks. "To the degree that people are seeing improvements in their feed, it is not due to the actions of specific individuals changing heuristics, but rather increasing use of Grok and other AI tools," Musk wrote in October. The company was working to have all of the more than 100 million daily posts published to X evaluated by Grok, which would then offer individual users the posts most likely to interest them, Musk wrote. "This will profoundly improve the quality of your feed." He added that the company was planning to roll out the new features by November.

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11 Jan 2026 5:34am GMT

An R&D lab under America's Energy Department annnounced this week that "Neuromorphic computers, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, are proving surprisingly adept at solving complex mathematical problems that underpin scientific and engineering challenges." Phys.org publishes the announcement from Sandia National Lab: In a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, Sandia National Laboratories computational neuroscientists Brad Theilman and Brad Aimone describe a novel algorithm that enables neuromorphic hardware to tackle partial differential equations, or PDEs - the mathematical foundation for modeling phenomena such as fluid dynamics, electromagnetic fields and structural mechanics. The findings show that neuromorphic computing can not only handle these equations, but do so with remarkable efficiency. The work could pave the way for the world's first neuromorphic supercomputer, potentially revolutionizing energy-efficient computing for national security applications and beyond... "We're just starting to have computational systems that can exhibit intelligent-like behavior. But they look nothing like the brain, and the amount of resources that they require is ridiculous, frankly," Theilman said.For decades, experts have believed that neuromorphic computers were best suited for tasks like recognizing patterns or accelerating artificial neural networks. These systems weren't expected to excel at solving rigorous mathematical problems like PDEs, which are typically tackled by traditional supercomputers. But for Aimone and Theilman, the results weren't surprising. The researchers believe the brain itself performs complex computations constantly, even if we don't consciously realize it. "Pick any sort of motor control task - like hitting a tennis ball or swinging a bat at a baseball," Aimone said. "These are very sophisticated computations. They are exascale-level problems that our brains are capable of doing very cheaply..." Their research also raises intriguing questions about the nature of intelligence and computation. The algorithm developed by Theilman and Aimone retains strong similarities to the structure and dynamics of cortical networks in the brain. "We based our circuit on a relatively well-known model in the computational neuroscience world," Theilman said. "We've shown the model has a natural but non-obvious link to PDEs, and that link hasn't been made until now - 12 years after the model was introduced." The researchers believe that neuromorphic computing could help bridge the gap between neuroscience and applied mathematics, offering new insights into how the brain processes information. "Diseases of the brain could be diseases of computation," Aimone said. "But we don't have a solid grasp on how the brain performs computations yet." If their hunch is correct, neuromorphic computing could offer clues to better understand and treat neurological conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

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11 Jan 2026 2:34am GMT

Half the country has enacted age-verification laws to prevent minors from viewing porn.

10 Jan 2026 12:00pm GMT

Including previous approvals, Starlink can now deploy 15,000 Gen2 satellites.

10 Jan 2026 12:52am GMT

ArianeGroup is still trying to catch up to where the bleeding edge of the launch industry was 15 years ago.

10 Jan 2026 12:06am GMT

In 2024 the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) started funding work on the ALPM project, which provides a Rust-based framework for Arch Linux Package Management. Refer to the project's FAQ and mission statement to learn more about the relation to the tooling currently in use on Arch Linux. The funding has now concluded, but over the time of 15 months allowed us to create various tools and integrations that we will highlight in the following sections. We have worked on six milestones with focus on various aspects of the package management ecosystem, ranging from formalizing, parsing and writing of …

10 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Did you know you can have newlines in pathnames? The design is very human and this absolutely doesn't have any unforeseen consequences! Also a friendly reminder that you can store anything on a nameserver if you try hard enough.

Originally posted by me on donotsta.re (2025-12-23)

09 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Since we entered a new year, we also entered a new quarter, and that means a new quarterly report from the Hurd, the project that aims to, to this day, developer a kernel for the GNU operating system. Over the course of the fourth quarter of 2025, an important undertaking has been to port dhcpcd to Hurd, which will ultimately bring IPv6 support to Hurd. For now, the port only supports IPv4, only works on Ethernet, and is still generally quite limited when it comes to its functionality. It's a great start, though, and an amazing effort. Furthermore, Q4 2025 also saw improvements in symmetric multiprocessing support on x86, not exactly a small feat. There's a ton of work left to be done, but progress is being made and that's important considering today's processor landscape. There's also the usual load of fixes, smaller improvements, and changes all over the operating system, and the report makes it clear that Debian's recent announcement that APT will start requiring Rust is not a major issue for Hurd, as it already has a Rust port.

08 Jan 2026 9:15pm GMT

MenuetOS, the operating system written in x86-64 assembly, released version 1.58.00. Since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, the included X server has been improved, networking performance has been increased, there's now native versions of classic X utilities like XEyes, XCalc, and others, and more. There's also the usual smaller improvements and bug fixes.

08 Jan 2026 8:54pm GMT

There's so much shit going on in the world right now, and we can all use a breather. So, let's join Carl Svensson and look at some pretty Amiga Workbench screenshots. Combining my love for screenshots with the love for the Amiga line of computers, I've decided to present a small, curated selection of noteworthy Amiga Workbenches - Workbench being the name of the Amiga's desktop environment. ↫ Carl Svensson I love how configurable and flexible the Amiga Workbench is, and how this aspect of it has been embraced by the Amiga community. All of these screenshots demonstrate a sense of purpose, and clearly reflect the kind of things their users do with their Amigas. I think "Graphics Card Workbench #1 (1997)" speaks to me the most, striking a great balance between the blocky, pixelated "old" Amiga look, and the more modern late '90s/early '00s Amiga look. The icon set in that one also vaguely reminds me of BeOS, which is always a plus. That being said, all of them look great and are instantly recognisable as Amiga desktops, and make me wish I had a modern Amiga capable of running Amiga OS 4.

08 Jan 2026 3:43pm GMT

2025 was a crazy simulation. A lot of glitches, plot twists and fun stuff™.

31 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT