While this year might well be the year of wearable devices, cloud (again), or DevOps — take your pick — it's above all a year in which the appreciation for developers is resurging. Software is quickly morphing from a support tool for other business activities to the means by which companies differentiate themselves. The suddenly popular observation, "Every company is now a software company," is indeed true for all but the smallest businesses. The result is greater demand for programmers and a greater thirst for information from those developers as they try to keep up with the changes occurring at their workplaces. The first six months of this year saw us slaking this thirst with a special emphasis on programming languages: not only new languages (such as Swift and Nimrod) and the crop of JavaScript alternatives, but major releases of established languages like Java 8.
In addition, we've run deep coverage on C and C++, and of course, we've kept a close eye on all things in .NET programming, including reviews of key new products. Add to this our usual nerd stim, which is my favorite part of Dr. Dobb's, and our annual salary survey, which remains the largest of its kind. In case you missed any of this coverage, below are links to the most popular articles from the first half of this year. Enjoy!
Languages
So You Want to Write Your Own Language?
Lambda Expressions in Java 8
Nimrod: A New Systems Programming Language
Lambdas in C++11
Swift, Objectively
The JavaScript Alternatives
Nuts and Bolts
2014 Developer Salary Survey
The Most Underused Compiler Switches in Visual C++
Unit Testing with Python
Debugging 256 GPU Threads in Visual Studio 2013
Editorials
The Corruption of Agile
The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source
Engineering Managers Should Code 30% of Their Time
The Non-Existent Software Crisis: Debunking the Chaos Report
Is goto Still Considered Harmful?
Jolt Awards
Coding Tools
Programmer Libraries
Testing Tools
Blogs
How I Came to Write D
Breadboarding ARM
How C Makes It Hard to Check Array Bounds
Use Frequent Branches to Simplify Code Reviews
Your Two Cents
Is there anything we missed that you'd really like to see covered? Drop me a line (my address is below) and let me know. We're gearing up to deliver more good content for the second half of the year, so this would be an ideal time to send in your requests and preferences. Thank you!
— Andrew Binstock
Editor in Chief
alb@drdobbs.com
Twitter: platypusguy
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