Programming: Masters and slaves, backing the wrong horse, and Julia
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Redis does a Python, crushes 'offensive' master, slave code terms
The open-source Redis database, like the Python programming language, is moving away from using the technical terms "master" and "slave" in its documentation and API – to the extent that's possible without breaking things.
For Python, the decision this week to replace the words "master" and "slave", prompted by undisclosed complaints that they're offensive, led to a backlash.
Meanwhile, those overseeing Python's CPython repo on Github today locked a pull request purging the words, and deleted several comments. But not before one developer highlighted the irony of executing the word change using the Git version-control software, which still relies heavily on "master" – for example, merging commits in the master branch. (Barely any instances of "slave" appear in Git code, though.)
The Register asked Python developer Victor Stinner, author of the pull requests and Python bug report at the heart of the issue, whether he would like to discuss the controversy, but he declined. In previous comments, he justified his proposals to strip "master" and "slave" from the widely used programming language by saying some people object to the terms.
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Backing the wrong horse?
I started using the Ruby programming in around 2003 or 2004, but stopped at some point later, perhaps around 2008. At the time I was frustrated with the approach the Ruby community took for managing packages of Ruby software: Ruby Gems. They interact really badly with distribution packaging and made the jobs of organisations like Debian more difficult. This was around the time that Ruby on Rails was making a big splash for web application development (I think version 2.0 had just come out). I did fork out for the predominant Ruby on Rails book to try it out. Unfortunately the software was evolving so quickly that the very first examples in the book no longer worked with the latest versions of Rails. I wasn't doing a lot of web development that at the time anyway, so I put the book, Rails and Ruby itself on the shelf and moved on to looking at the Python programming language instead.
Since then I've written lots of Python, both professionally and personally. Whenever it looked like a job was best solved with scripting, I'd pick up Python. I hadn't stopped to reflect on the experience much at all, beyond being glad I wasn't writing Perl any more (the first language I had any real traction with, 20 years ago).
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Google's Dataset Search, Julia programming language, and more news
TechRepublic described this programming language, originating from 2012 and just released as version 1.0, as follows: "designed to combine the speed of C with the usability of Python, the dynamism of Ruby, the mathematical prowess of MatLab, and the statistical chops of R."
Liked by data scientists and mathematicians, Julia is also used in industries, such as the automotive industry for self-driving cars, and for 3-D printing.
Julia is open source, counts 700 active contributors, 1,900 registered packages and two-million downloads. Details, download, and documentation can be found on julialang.org.
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