The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) presents its first-ever Programming Languages Software Award to Chris Lattner of Apple Inc. for his design and development of the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), a compiler infrastructure that has been quickly adopted by a wide array of industry and academic organizations.

Just to state or perhaps even emphasise the obvious, OOXML is a very large stack of proprietary Microsoft technologies, which directly contradict and antagonise existing standards, and not by coincidence. Microsoft has always established itself separately from the rest of the industry...

It's not always true that the neatest, most advanced technology ends up winning most of the market share. There are other reasons which get in the way. Sometimes, the less advanced solutions end up winning - and evolve in order to become more solid and established.

In the ongoing debate between open source purists and people who appreciate and defend proprietary software, extremists will always have their voices, but many people in the open source community are waking up to the fact that proprietary platforms and applications can co-exist peacefully with open source ones.

Yet I still wonder. How many people have switched to free platforms after realizing that they already used or could switch to completely free software that did what they needed?

Synthetic biology aims at producing novel biological systems to carry out some desired and well-defined functions. An ultimate dream is to design these systems at a high level of abstraction using engineering-based tools and programming language.

Anivar Aravindcalls upon saner Indian community to write to BIS and ask them to stop adapting the proprietary standards of Microsoft. Open standards are the way to go. India shouldn’t fall into the trap of proprietary standards and go back to dark ages.

Jobs is not good for jobs, suggests news story; iPhones all have the same root password

College computer science students often find it difficult to get started in programming languages like C++ and Java, largley due to the disconnect between simple middle-school languages like logo and advanced object-oriented programming (OOP) languages.