Tag: programming

Smart machines need ethics

Posted on March 17, 2015 by - News

robby the robotGartner said CIOs need to develop “ethical programming for smart machines”.

What does that mean? According to Frank Buytendijk, a research VP at Gartner: “People must trust smart machines if they are to accept and use them. The ability to earn trust must be part of any plan to implement artificial intelligence (AI) or smart machines, and will be an important selling point when marketing this technology.”

But not all programming needs to be ethical – vapourware is by its very nature not at all ethical, said Gartner. “The first release of any software is seldom complete.”

But when you get to so-called smart machines like virtual personal assistants, the responsibility for ethics is shared between the service provider and designer. For example, asking a bit of smartphone software which bridge is the best to hurl yourself off is clearly far from ethical. Instead, the software should point you in the direction of a psychoanalyst or support worker.

Where ethics really becomes important is when you put a smart machine – like an autonomous car, in charge of life and limb.

Self aware machines are still a long way off but that’s when we’ll really be in trouble. Gartner says self aware machines will be responsible for their own behaviour.

If they behave unethically or perform illegal acts, perhaps they will need to be taken to a digital court and punished accordingly.

It’s all a bit Isaac Asimov but self aware machines are, right now, merely an idea.

MIT invents new web programming language

Posted on December 24, 2014 by - News

nand-chipsComputer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) think their invention might make life a lot easier if you’re developing web pages.

They’ve just gone and invented a programming language called Ur/Web that they claim will let developers write web apps as self contained program.

The compiler part of the equation auto generates XML code and style sheet specs, and then just goes right ahead and throws Javascript and database code where it should be.

Adam Chlipala, a professor of software tech at MIT claimed Ur/Web makes web pages more secure.

But there’s still some pain for web developers said Chiplala because the compiler doesn’t auto generate style sheets.

Once you’ve typed in your code the compiler takes a long hard look at it and gives a list of CSS classes.

He said that the last thing developers want is for apps to have the ability to read and overwrite passwords.  Web frameworks generally speaking assume every little line of a program has complete access to a database. Ur/Web doesn’t, he claims.

MIT didn’t say how you’ll get your paws on the programming language.

Ruby on Rails is dying

Posted on November 26, 2014 by - News

damsel-in-distress-4Ruby on Rails is dying off, despite the fact that those with the skill can make a killing according to a new report from Quartz.

Quartz found that by using US job listing data collected by Burning Glass and the Brookings Institution, and dividing by its shoe size,the most valuable programming skill to have today is Ruby on Rails. If you have the skill you can take home an average salary of $109,460.

But other data indicates that Rails (and Ruby) usage is not trending upwards.

Quartz homed in on the demand for workers with programming-specific skills and based it all on a large data set which was nearly two years old. Phil Johnson at ITworld had a look at some other figures collected by MS Gooroo, which has collected data from over 300,000 job listings in the US, UK and Australia.

While this confirmed that Ruby on Rails experts were still getting paid a bomb, The percentage of US job listings mentioning Rails in July 2014 was 1.1 percent, which was down from 1.8 percent in December 2013, an almost 40 percent drop. While the pay for Rails engineers is high, demand over the last year seems to be dropping.

Rails is a framework, and not a programming language, but Ruby is the language upon which Rails was built. The most recent TIOBE index of programming language popularity, which is based on web searches for languages, from this month, Ruby was ranked 14th, down from 13th in November 2013 and 11th in January 2013.

Another PYPL index of programming languages, which ranks languages based on searches for web tutorials about them, ranked Ruby 10th, the same spot it held one year ago and down slightly from January, 2013 when it ranked 9th.

It looks like demand by U.S. employers for engineers with Rails skills, however, has been on the decline, at least for the last year.

If use of the Ruby programming language itself can be considered a reliable proxy for the use of Rails, its use by engineers has also been dropping at least moderately since the beginning of 2013.