Swift has made it into the TIOBE Index’s top 10 programming languages for the first time. Swift is a programming language Apple created about three years ago to replace its other application development language Objective-C.

“The expectations were high right from the start, but adoption took off slowly. That is for good reasons by the way because the installed base of Objective-C code is quite large. New applications are written in Swift, whereas old apps that are written in Objective-C are not actively migrated to Swift. This is also what we observe at customer sites. Since Swift is mainly intended to write applications in Apple’s ecosystem, it is expected that it won’t rise much further,” TIOBE wrote in its index.

Other top languages include: Java, C, C++, C#, Python, Visual Basic .NET, PHP, JavaScript and Delphi/Object Pascal.

BlackBerry introduces new APIs
BlackBerry has announced the BlackBerry Dynamics Communication APIs. The newly introduced APIs are designed to securely connect enterprise app servers.

“BlackBerry Dynamics provides APIs to protect data in transit when making a socket or HTTPS request. When these APIs are used to send data from a client application, BlackBerry Dynamics encrypts and sends the data securely to enterprise application servers behind the enterprise firewall,” the BlackBerry team wrote in its developer blog.

Red Hat’s OpenSCAP 1.2 gets NIST certification
Red Hat announced OpenSCAP 1.2, an open-source Security Content Automation Protocol scanner, has been certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a US government evaluated configuration and vulnerability scanner for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7-based systems.

With this certification, OpenSCAP can analyze and evaluate automation content as well as provide the functionality and documentation required by NIST.

“Continuous, repeatable scanning processes are key to keeping modern, increasingly-complex computing environments more secure and safe, and open standards help to make these processes achievable. NIST’s new certification of OpenSCAP on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform provides a flexible, powerful SCAP scanner built on open standards, making it easier for agencies and other organizations to add verifiable, repeatable security scanning to their repertoires,” said David Egts, chief technologist for the public sector at Red Hat.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
O’Reilly Media published  97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, and today, all 97 of these items are available for free, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.

The collection contains varied perspectives on what it is that contributors to the project feel programmers should know, according to O’Reilly Media. It includes everything from code-focused advice to cultural, algorithms, implementations, languages, technology, and more.

The collection can be reviewed here.

GNU APL 1.7 released
GNU APL, a free implementation of the ISO standard “Programming Language APL, Extended,” released version 1.7. This release contains bug fixes, SQL and DLX updates.
In this release, GNU APL gets an interface from the programming languages Erlang and Elixir. With his interface a developer can use APL’s vector capabilities in programs written in Erlang or Elixir or from the Phoenix web framework. Also, all bug fixes reported before March 17, 2017 were fixed, writes Jürgen Sauermann, author and maintainer of GNU APL in a thread.