It was inevitable...

Another Pi digits calculation record.

Some interesting ideas for our crowdsourcing game in here.

Cool algorithm! We should implement it in PaGMO.

Pretty impressive examples of html5. Maybe interesting for the crowdsourcing game?

The only proper way to browse Ariadnet.

Nice opinion piece.

As discussed during lunchtime...

It will be interesting to see how this will develop.

C-R-E-E-P-Y image in here...

Yeah... I wonder if/how they plan to plug it?

Of course, the golden PaGMO coding standard! :)

Finally LaTeX for Google docs?

Here it works fine in Chromium, Firefox and Opera (Linux).

One of the authors of the STL (C++'s Standard Template Library) explains generic programming and slams Java.

Personally, I never understood what the point of Java is, given that: 1) I do not know of any developer (maybe Marek?) that uses it for intellectual pleasure/curiosity/fun whatever, given the possibility of choice - this to me speaks loudly on the objective qualities of the language more than any industrial-corporate marketing bullshit (for the record, I argue that Python is more interoperable, lighter and easier to learn than Java - which is why, e.g., Google is using it heavily); 2) I have used a software developed in Java maybe a total of 5 times on any computer/laptop I owned over 15 years. I cannot name of one single Java project that I find necessary or even useful; for my usage of computers, Java could disappear overnight without even noticing. Then of course one can argue as much as one wants about the "industry choosing Java", to which I would counterargue with examples of industry doing stupid things and making absurd choices. But I suppose it would be a kind of pointless discussion, so I'll just stop here :)

"I'd rather not even *think* about developing a web application/webservice/web-whatever in standard C++... is it actually possible?? Perhaps with some weird Microsoft solutions... I bet your bank online services are written in Java. Certainly not in PHP+MySQL :)" Doing in C++ would be awesomely crazy, I agree :) But as I see it there are lots of huge websites that operate on PHP, see for instance Facebook. For the banks and the enterprise market, as a general rule I tend to take with a grain of salt whatever spin comes out from them; in the end behind every corporate IT decision there is a little smurf just trying to survive and have the back covered :) As they used to say in the old times, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". "Industry has chosen Java not because of industrial-corporate marketing bullshit, but because of economics... it enables you develop robustly, reliably, error-prone, modular, well integrated etc... software. And the costs? Well, using java technologies you can set-up enterprise-quality web application servers, get a fully featured development environment (which is better than ANY C/C++/whatever development environment I've EVER seen) at the cost of exactly 0 (zero!) USD/GBP/EUR... Since many years now, the central issue in software development is not implementing algorithms, it's building applications. And that's where Java outperforms many other technologies." Apart from the IDE considerations (on which I cannot comment, since I'm not a IDE user myself), I do not see how Java beats the competition in this regard (again, Python and the huge software ecosystem surrounding it). My impression is that Java's success is mostly due to Sun pushing it like there is no tomorrow and bundling it with their hardware business.