7 New Popular Programming Languages

Seven increasingly popular niche programming languages offer features that cannot be found in the dominant languages. For example, Python has gained popularity in scientific labs. "Scientists often need to improvise when trying to interpret results, so they are drawn to dynamic languages which allow them to work very quickly and see results almost immediately," says Python's creator Guido von Rossum. Many Wall Street firms also rely on Python because they like to hire university scientists to work on complex financial analysis problems. Meanwhile, Ruby is becoming popular for prototyping. Ruby sites are devoted to cataloging data that can be stored in tables. MatLab was originally designed for mathematicians to solve systems of linear equations, but it also has found a following in the enterprise because of the large volumes of data that organizations need to analyze. Although JavaScript is not a new programming language, new applications for JavaScript are constantly in development. For example, CouchDB uses JavaScript's Map and Reduce functions to help bring harmony to both client and server-side programming. Other popular niche languages include R, which also is known as S and S-Plus, Erlang, Cobol, and CUDA.

Internet Users To Hit 2 Billion: UN agency

The number of Internet users will surpass two billion this year, approaching a third of the world population, but developing countries need to step up access to the vital tool for economic growth, a United Nations agency said on Tuesday. Users have doubled in the past five years, and compare with an estimated global population of 6.9 billion, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said. Of 226 million new Internet users this year, 162 million will be from developing countries where growth rates are now higher, the ITU said in a report. However, by the end of 2010, 71 per cent of the population in developed countries will be online compared with 21 per cent of people in developing countries. The ITU said it was particularly important for developing countries to build up high-speed connections. “Broadband is the next tipping point, the next truly transformational technology,” said ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure, of Mali. “It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity and underpin long-term economic competitiveness.” Access varies widely by region, with 65 per cent of people online in Europe, ahead of 55 per cent in the Americas, compared with only 9.6 per cent of the population in Africa and 21.9 per cent in Asia/Pacific, the ITU said. Access to the Internet in schools, at work and in public places is critical for developing countries, where only 13.5 per cent of people have the Internet at home, against 65 per cent in developed countries, it said. A study last week by another U.N. agency showed that mobile phones were a far more important communications technology for people in the poorest developing countries than the Internet.