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  • JetBrains Releases IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1

    JetBrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1, the latest version of their most popular IDE. The new version seems to have the polyglot developer in mind, with multiple enhancements over a variety of languages and technologies; however, the most noticeable changes are aimed at Java, particularly at helping developers take full advantage of Java 8.

  • LFE Brings Lisp to the Erlang Virtual Machine

    After 8 years of development, Lisp Flavoured Erlang (LFE) has reached version 1.0, bringing stable support for Lisp programming on the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM). LFE was created by Robert Virding, one of the initial developers of Erlang. InfoQ has spoken with Duncan McGreggor, current maintainer of LFE.

  • Bloomberg Open-sources BuckleScript, JavaScript Backend for OCaml

    Recently open-sourced BuckleScript, a JavaScript backend for OCaml, aims to bring OCaml type safe, high performance code to any JavaScript execution engine, Bloomberg say.

  • Simplifying Database Queries with Jinq

    Jinq, a library to provide a DSL for database queries, has been made available for Java and Scala. The work is inspired by .NET's LINQ, and aims at enabling easy-to-write queries with support for type safety. As commented by Ming-Yee Iu, creator of the tool, work on Jinq started in 2006 under project name Queryll; however, the adoption of lambdas in Java 8 is what has realised its full potential.

  • Scala Centre Foundation Created

    Last week, the Scala Center was created as a not-for-profit foundation, along with a list of financial backers, to improve the ongoing development of Scala and provide training courses based around the Scala language.

  • Using the Actor-model Language Pony for FinTech

    During his opening Keynote at QCon London on Monday morning Adrian Colyer mentioned the Pony Language as being "really fascinating stuff." We were fortunate enough to have the designer of the language, Sylvan Clebsch, giving a talk on the native languages track on the Wednesday. Clebsch suggested that Pony is a natural fit for FinTech systems.

  • Typesafe Changes Name to Lightbend

    The company formerly known as Typesafe, inventors of the Scala programming language, has completed their renaming and is now known as Lightbend. Typesafe announced their plans to rename last May, stating at that time that it was expected to be a two month process. They invited community members to participate, and provided blog updates about their progress.

  • Racket 6.4 Improves Security and Adds Incremental Garbage Collection

    Racket, a multi-paradigm programming language belonging to the Lisp/Scheme family, has reached version 6.4, PLT announced. The new version adds several new features, including an incremental garbage collector (GC), and fixes a vulnerability in the web server.

  • OCaml Now Ready for iOS Development

    San Francisco-based programmer Edgar Aroutiounian has recently created a package for OCamliOS, an OCaml cross-compiler for iOS recently made available by Jeffrey A. Scofield that should eventually be merged into the official OCaml compiler. InfoQ has spoken with Aroutiounian.

  • Architecting Scalable, Dynamic Systems when Eventual Consistency Won’t Work

    Architecting a scalable and dynamic system without caching is explained by Peter Morgan, head of engineering for the sports betting company William Hill. The values of the bets on sporting events change constantly. No data can be cached; all system values must be current. Distributed Erlang processes model domain objects which instantly recalculate system values based on data streams from Kafka.

  • Elixir 1.2 Brings Enhancements, Performance Improvements

    José Valim has announced version 1.2 of the dynamic, functional Programming language Elixir. Valim, creator of Elixir, says the release "brings enhancements, bug fixes, performance improvements and more," noting that it requires at least Erlang 18+.

  • Racket 6.3 Brings New Macro Expander, Redex Improvements, and More

    PLT Design has announced Racket 6.3, the newest version of its multi-paradigm programming language belonging to the Lisp/Scheme family. Racket 6.3 introduces a new macro expander, an improved Redex DSL, and support for GTK3 among other things.

  • Haskell Can Now Do Strict Evaluation by Default

    A new Strict language extension to Haskell aims to make it easier to use Haskell for code that is meant to be mostly strict, i.e., evaluated in a non-lazy manner. The feature was recently merged into GHC’s git HEAD and will be included in GHC’s next release.

  • Erik Meijer’s Hacker’s Way

    At GoTo 2015, Erik Meijer, computer scientist whose name is linked to functional programming and reactive asynchronous programming, recounted the last couple of years in his life, including his cancer diagnosis and how it changed his way of looking at life, and shared his view on the Hacker’s Way.

  • IntelliJ IDEA 15 Released

    JetBrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 15, with improved Java 8 lambda debugger support, a better user interface for running tests, enhanced JVM frameworks support (Spring 4.2, Hibernate 5.0, Grails 3.x, and Arquillian), TypeScript 1.6 and TSLint integration, and initial support for Angular 2.

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