Author: Infoworld

SQL, the Structured Query Language, remains one of the most widely used programming languages, coming in fourth in Stack Overflow’s research for 2023. Just over half (51.52%) of professional developers use SQL in their work, but only around a third (35.29%) of those learning to code use SQL.For a language that has remained in use for decades, SQL has a mixed reputation among developers. Why does SQL remain in use when so many other languages have come and gone? And why does SQL have a bright future still?Ubiquity and stabilityOne reason why SQL remains in use is because it is…

Science fiction writers and directors love creating high-tech visions of the future. Over the years, their collective imagination has dreamed up possible futures that are awesome, amazing, terrifying, and often totally wrong.Such imaginative speculation isn’t necessarily a crime or even a mistake. After all, it’s just fiction: a bit of fun exploring what might be. It’s not a rigorous, results-oriented slog—that’s for the programmer nerds back in the salt mines. Science fiction is an expedition where we let our imaginations run wild.Science fiction creators have also been right at least some of the time. Some sci-fi visions have even helped…

JetBrains has released Compose Multiplatform 1.6.0, an upgrade to the company’s declarative UI framework that introduces a UI testing API and improves the common resources API. Compose Multiplatform allows developers to build UIs for Android, iOS, desktop, and web from a shared code base.Compose Multiplatform 1.6.0 was unveiled on February 28. Instructions for getting started with Compose Multiplatform can be found at jetbrains.com.The update features a common API for UI testing. This experimental API allows developers to write common UI tests that validate the behavior of an application’s user interface across platforms supported by the framework. For example, developers might…

President Joseph Biden has issued an executive order intended to protect Americans’ sensitive personal data from exploitation from countries of concern including China, Russa, Iran, and North Korea.Issued February 28, the order authorizes the attorney general to prevent the large-scale transfer of Americans’ personal data to countries of concern and offers safeguards around other activities that can give these countries access to this sensitive data.“Countries of concern can rely on advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, to analyze and manipulate bulk sensitive personal data to engage in espionage, influence, kinetic, or cyber operations or to identify other potential strategic advantages over…

Elon Musk, one of OpenAI’s founding board members and investors, has filed a lawsuit against the company and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that the now Microsoft-financed creator of ChatGPT has breached its founding mission.“This case is filed to compel OpenAI to adhere to the founding agreement and return to its mission to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual defendants and the largest technology company in the world,” the lawyers wrote as part of the suit.The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of California in the County of San Francisco,…

NoSQL document-oriented database provider Couchbase on Thursday said that it was working to add support for vector capabilities to its database offerings, including  its Capella managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS).The vector capabilities will include similarity search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), the company said, adding that the addition of these capabilities will also enhance the performance of the database as all search patterns can be supported within a single index to lower response latency.Database vendors have been adding vector search capabilities to help enterprises build generative AI-based applications. Earlier in the day, Google Cloud said that it was adding vector support to all its database offerings, including…

I recently participated in a documentary called “Clouded II: Does Cloud Cost the Earth?” Please watch it. It looks at the issues surrounding cloud computing, its consumption of power, and thus its potential impact on the planet.The documentary did an excellent job of balancing perspectives. I don’t think anyone is arguing that data centers should not exist, but those data centers should be efficient and minimize power consumption. This means optimizing the resources we use and moving away from the “store all the data” mentality we’ve had for the past 50 years. We created 64 zettabytes of global data in 2020, and…

JavaScript is a wildly popular interpreted scripting language that was the most in-demand language of 2023, with 29% of job offers requiring programming experience with JavaScript or TypeScript. There are various reasons for JavaScript’s success, starting from the fact that it’s an open standard, not controlled by any single vendor, with numerous implementations and a syntax that is easy to learn.Just about anything interactive or animated on a webpage today is rendered in JavaScript. Thanks to server-side frameworks such as Node.js, Deno, and bun, the language also extends beyond the browser. It is used to write code for anything from…

GitHub has begun rolling out push protection for all of its users, a secrets scanning feature that gives users the option to remove secrets from commits or bypass a block.The policy, announced February 29, affects supported secrets. It might take one to two weeks for this change to apply to an account; developers can verify status and opt in early in code security and analysis settings. GitHub secret scanning guards more than 200 token types and patterns from more than 180 service providers.With push protection, secret scanning lists secrets it detects and allows the developer to remove them or bypass…

Stack Overflow, the popular question-and-answer portal for developers, has partnered with Google’s cloud computing arm to develop an API that will give Google’s Gemini AI model access to Stack Overflow’s knowledge base.Dubbed the Overflow API, the new offering will inform Gemini’s coding assistance capabilities for Google Cloud, delivered to developers via the Google Cloud Console. The suggestions made by Gemini will cite Stack Overflow sources, the companies said in a statement.The Overflow API, which is currently in the development phase, will be previewed at Google’s upcoming Cloud Next conference in April, followed by availability within the first half of 2024.In…