2006 At Programmer's Heaven: The Highlights
As another year draws to a close and the Programmer's Heaven team take a break for Christmas, it's time to take a look back over the year that's just been.
In The News
A year is a relatively long time in the fast-paced world of technology. This year we've seen Vista amble towards its release, finally getting to the finish line, though with relatively little fanfare. Intel launched their range of dual core chips and they are selling well, meaning that like it or not, parallel computing is going to become more and more important and we as developers are going to have to think about it more. The good news is that we have better primitives than threads and locks for building concurrent applications on. The bad news is that you may not see them in the languages you work in every day for a little while.
For gamers, there has been a range of new consoles to play with. Thanks to Nintendo, we've seen some delightful headlines along the lines of, "Gamers line up for a wii". They weren't the only ones being quirky in the names department though - XNA, a free games development environment from Microsoft, is short for the recursively ironic "XNA's Not an Acronym".
Virtualization has continued to be a big deal. Many Linux distributions now ship with some virtualization environment - Xen is the most common choice. There are Windows solutions, there are Mac OSX solutions - it seems that soon you will be able to run any combination of operating systems on any platform you like. Virtual machines for high level languages have stayed in the news too, with Sun open-sourcing their Java Virtual Machine. There has long been a great deal of the open source community building on Java or making their own JVM implementations, so Sun have made many people happy by doing this.
On The Site
We've managed to turn out three big new features this year. The first of these was the
Webtools - a range of browser-based utilities to assist you with building websites and web applications, tracking down problems with them and promoting them. The HTTP Debugger in advanced mode is a pretty useful tool for seeing exactly what your web server is spewing out, or what happens if you fake some cookies to your web application. My other favourite is the Regex Tester - simply stick in a regular expression and something that it's supposed to match on, and the tool will tell you if it matched, and in the case that it did show you all of the groups and captures. Neat.
The second new feature was our
Jobs area, which we developed
in a day, supplied with lots of hamburgers, chocolate, Chinese takeout and a trip to a strange Arabic tea place where the smoke was so thick you could see it hanging in the air.
Finally, we made it possible to browse inside the many ZIP files we have available for download. That means that you do not need to download a ZIP file to have a quick glance at the code in it to see if it is useful - you can look at it on the site. Even better, we implemented syntax highlighting of source code in many languages.
The C# School was finally released in
ebook form, complete with an additional chapter on C# 2.0. Continuing with our "whatever school" series, there was the
SQL Server 2005 School. We also launched the
biggest Perl 6 FAQ on the web, along with a
getting started guide.
Programmer's Heaven now features over 32,000 resources and we just sent out our 250th newsletter.
In The Polls
One of the things I get to do here at Programmer's Heaven is write some of the user polls. Here's a round up of what we've discovered about the average Programmer's Heaven user from them. Note that these results are pretty unscientific, and only really tell you about the people who visit Programmer's Heaven and vote in our weekly poll.
In line with the view that coffee is the most common drink for programmers, it was also the most common drink for people to spill on their computers. Just 34% of you claimed that you had never spilt a drink on your computer. Only 1% of you were classy enough to spill champagne on your computer.
On a more serious note, only 15% of you said you were planning to move to Windows Vista as soon as it came out or were already running the release candidates. This is less than the 17% who plan to move to Linux instead. Just a percent shy of a quarter of you plan to stick with Windows XP.
We asked, "If you find an unsecured wireless network, is it right to assume that you can use it?" Just over half of you said that it was fine to use it, but it was far from unanimous; 10% of you were still unsure. It looks like this is a debate that will go on for a while.
47% of you think that I didn't waste three years doing a fairly theoretical degree in Computer Science, answering that having an understanding of theoretical computer science makes you a "much better" programmer. Here, here. 9% of you thought such knowledge was worthless, while happily working on your program to solve the halting problem. Whatever that is.
On the subject of statically and dynamically typed languages, the results were pretty much half the votes to each, if you subtract those people who thought both were fine or didn't know. Dynamic languages (and there's more to those than just dynamic typing, but that's for another article) seem to be growing in popularity, whatever the case.
Finally, 15% of you answered "How many of your friends are programmers?" with the wonderfully ambiguous "Have none". It's inconclusive whether that means you have no friends who program, or just have none at all. These can be rectified by hanging around on the PH forums more or getting out more.
Looking Forward
2007 is the year we get C# 3.0 (hurrah). It may be the year of the Linux desktop again. Maybe Perl 6 will be finished (we're coding as fast as we can!) And, of course, we've lots of good stuff coming up on Programmer's Heaven. We're currently working on re-implementing the forums in ASP.Net, doing fixes for many annoyances and adding some handy new features, including a threaded view so you can see the whole thread on a single page if you wish, a better message editor and attachments. We plan to have this released early 2007 - stay tuned!
Jonathan Worthington works at Programmer's Heaven, cutting code and writing articles. He's interested in programming language design and semantics, type theory and virtual machines. He hacks on the Parrot virtual machine, being developed to run Perl 6. In his free time he enjoys travelling, eating curry and walking in nice scenery.
