DevSource: Microsoft Microsoft Languages

As predicted, Facebook has delivered a new PHP platform called HipHop for PHP that much improves performance of the popular scripting language known among application developers for its relative lack in that area.

With Microsoft touting its dynamic language support with technologies such as IronPython and IronRuby, a developer in Sweden named Fredrik Holmstrom is working toward the 0.1 release of a project known as IronJS, which will do for JavaScript what the aforementioned technologies did for Python and Ruby.

While competitors are coming up with new, "modern" programming languages, Microsoft continues to evolve its tried and true languages such as Visual Basic and C#, with new features -- including future plans to open up the respective compilers to developers and to add support for asynchronous programming and immutability.

Google's new programming language, called Go, took the application development world by storm when the search giant released it Nov. 10. The ambitious technology's pedigree features programming experts from the Unix world, including Ken Thompson, who teamed with Dennis Ritchie to create Unix. Created as a systems programming language to help speed up development of systems inside Google, Go is now viewed as a general-purpose language for Web development, mobile development, addressing parallelism and a lot more.

Evans Data has announced that use of the Python programming language has increased by 45 percent since the spring of 2008.

Google introduced a new programming language, called Go, that is aimed at being fast, productive and fun for developers to use.

Jeff Cogswell continues his introduction to the PHP programming language. In this week's PHP tutorial, Jeff talks more about program control as well as the details of server-side programming.

Ready to learn PHP? This is the first in a series of articles by Jeff Cogswell, well-known Dummies author and teacher.

Microsoft has released a new open-source project that bridges PHP and .NET using Representational State Transfer (REST).

Microsoft updates its Visual Studio tool set with new capabilities to better support parallel programming.

Microsoft has announced that it will be applying its Community Promise to its C# language and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), which in essence frees up developers from any patent or other claims Microsoft might exercise over the use of its intellectual property.

If you thought Silverlight 2 was great, you haven't seen anything yet. Silverlight 3 introduces 50 new features that will make your browser applications truly spectacular!

Microsoft has come one step closer to delivering a commercial parallel programming language to developers. Microsoft has turned the Axum incubation project over to its MSDN DevLabs portal where the company houses some of its more innovative projects that are being worked on and evaluated for commercialization.

Internet Explorer 8 has a number of interesting new features, but possibly the most interesting is the ability to slice a Web site into subscribable pieces using Web slices.

Microsoft is working on a new language for parallel programming named Axum. Formerly known as “Maestro,” Axum is an incubation project that Microsoft is working on to help programmers tackle the issue of parallel programming in the .NET environment.

Review of JavaScript: The Missing Manual, by David Sawyer McFarland. O'Reilly/Pogue Press 2008. $39.99. ISBN: 978-0-596-51589-8.

Ecma International issues the final draft of the next version of ECMAScript, now known as ECMAScript, Fifth Edition. ECMAScript is the standard that defines JavaScript.

A waitable time is a synchronization object whose state is set to signaled when a specified due time arrives. In this article, Jim Mischel shows you how to get the most of waitable times using C#.

In a solution called Code Contracts for .Net, which came out of Microsoft Research, Microsoft is providing a design-by-contract mechanism for .Net programmers.

More than twice as many developers in emerging IT markets such as China and India use the Ruby language as in North America or Western Europe, according to a study from Evans Data surveying 400 application developers. Evans Data says the study found that in emerging markets and Eastern Europe developers showed a much stronger interest in the use of Ruby.