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Featured Articles

Computation— we all know what it is but can you define it? This is the first problem to be solved, before we can even start on a theory of computation.

What is functional programming? Surely all our programs should function in some way or other? No - that's not what it means. Functional programming is altogether different....

Programming News and Views

We seem to be worried a lot about the threat from AI going rogue, and there are lots of examples of it doing just that. However, they are all misrepresentations, as AI has no intent and no motivation.

OpenAI's latest generation LLM has successfully deciphered unsolved coded messages from both World War I and World War II, demonstrating yet another area of expertise. Is this a superhuman achievement?

Cloudflare OS is an open source productivity platform designed to integrate AI agents, custom applications and secure corporate workflows into a unified workspace.

Google has released version 1.0 of the Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Kotlin. The ADK comes with a set of tools, custom functions, and OpenAPI specs which can be used to define agent logic, tools, and orchestration directly in Kotlin.

Java 27 brings 9 official JDK Enhancement Proposals, comprising of 4 finalized features, 4 preview features, and 1 incubator feature, along with several notable runtime cleanups and performance improvements.

Apple has released Swift 6.4 with enhanced interoperability, and a new stable, cross-platform way to run and interact with other programs from Swift, from command-line tools to streaming processes.

The claims made this month that AI could be an existential threat to humans and wipe out mankind within the decade may have dented our confidence and optimism in what the era of AI brings. However, it being an existential threat to weeds in agricultural crops sounds much more promising,

There was a time when the Fast Fourier Transform was the star of the show, but today it is simply the foundation that we take for granted. This makes it no less amazing. We celebrate it on the occasion of the 100th birthday of one of its inventors.

PyCon US is the largest and longest running annual gathering of the Python community. We provide an overview of this year's event.

NVIDIA has announced a new Rust environment for writing native GPU kernels. CUDA Rust will join CUDA C++ and CUDA Python in NVIDIA's range of CUDA languages.

Julia 1.13 has been released. This version improves latency and the Julia REPL now has syntax highlighting.

Book Watch

This book takes a self-paced approach to cater for new and existing programmers. If you already know other languages, you can move quickly through the familiar to focus on the new as you learn Python faster. Joel Murach and Michael Urban start with an 8-chapter introduction course to Python that gets as far as using functions and modules to organize a program that uses file I/O to read and write data. Section 2 builds on that foundation with additional skills every Python programmer needs. Section 3 dives into object-oriented programming. And section 4 brings it all together as you build realistic database and GUI applications.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to basic computer graphic technology and theory. Focusing on geometric intuition, Steve Marschner and Peter Shirley give the necessary information for understanding how images get onto the screen by using the complementary approaches of ray tracing and rasterization. It covers topics common to an introductory course, such as sampling theory, texture mapping, spatial data structure, and splines. It also includes a number of contributed chapters from authors known for their expertise and clear way of explaining concepts.

Subtitled "A step-by-step guide to building your first playable third-person game", this book teaches Unreal Engine 5 via a hands-on game project, progressing from editor basics and Blueprints to AI, UI, cinematics, polish, and packaging.
Authors Zhenyu George Li , Charles Shih-I Yeh and Michael Oakes begin by showing how to install Unreal Engine, setting up a first project, and exploring the editor to build and light levels. As the book progresses, readers will create gameplay with Blueprints, import and animate a player character, and configure controls with Enhanced Input. They'll then develop AI enemies and implement gameplay rules, mission objectives, and win-and-lose conditions.

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