Random thoughts about random subjects… From science to literature and between manga and watercolours, passing by data science and rugby; including film, physics and fiction, programming, pictures and puns.
So has C# finally dethrone C++ as THE language of the year? Or has LOLCODE and Brainfuck made it into the list? Well not quite, but an interesting thing is the uptake of Objective-C taking the third place! Of course an explanation can be found in the explosion of iOS apps that are developed with that language.
The usual suspects, i.e. C and Java are still at the top, followed by Objective-C and C++. It is interesting to note that they all share a very similar structure.
Languages in the other top ten are pretty good candidates and should not be too much of a surprise to see PHP, VB and Python there. Nice to see that languages like Pascal and Ada are still there in the top 20. But Bash? Really? How can we explain the move from 72nd to 20th?
And after that? Well, Fortran appears in place 25th… (I know!), COBOL and SQL are there and for those that have taken the R programming language to their hearts, it makes an appearance at the 26th place. An interesting addition is the appearance of the educational language Alice at the 50th place.
Ada Lovelace. Painting by Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1793–1872)
Ada Augusta Byron, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. She studied mathematics at the University of London with Charles Babbage, whose analytical engines were the precursors of the modern computer. Today 10th of December, it would have been her 197th birthday. That is why Google created a doodle for her (see image below).
Ada Lovelace is today known as a mathematician and computer pioneer; she created the concept of an operating system. Supplementing her translation of an Italian article on Babbage’s analytical engine with an encoded algorithm she published the first computer program, albeit for a machine that would not be built until more than 150 years later as a historical project.
Well, I have now made the move to Mountain Lion and for a bit it did look quite good, until I had the nerve of trying to start MATLAB. Now, I must admit that the version of MATLAB that I have is by no means the latest, but it does do the work (for those of you who asked, I am running 2008a). So, I realised that the final blow for X11 was given and that Mountain Lion did indeed get rid of it.
I had encountered this issue when upgrading GIMP, and at the time, everything seemed to be working fine with XQuartz. So, there was I thinking to myself “It is just a matter then of re-installing XQuartz and off we go”. How wrong was I! I installed XQuartz, downloaded from here. The first glimpse that things were not quite correct was when I had to tell manually to GIMP the location of X11. Then tried to launch MATLAB and quite quickly the following message popped up:
“X11 does not appear to be installed. X11 version 1.1.3 or greater is required. For OS X 10.5 or later, X11 is available on the OS X installation DVD. Please find and run the Optional Installs.mpkg installer.”
Great thing that Mathworks has told me that, but Apple does not do X11 anymore, so no installing from the DVD, righ?t! Worse still, unlike GIMP, there was no prompt from MATLAB to tell it the location of X11. I tried creating some symbolic links, but this did not work either. Finally, after a lot of fiddling and searching and all, I found a way to run MATLAB successfully. A solution? Oh well here it is:
Install XQuartz
Launch XQuartz and from the menu launch an xterm.
Type the following command first:
$MATLAB/bin/matlab -maci
Where $MATLAB is the path to your installation. And voilà!
Incidentally, if you are having problems with the graphics in MATLAB, such as the application crashing when plotting and the like, you can type the following command before launching MATLAB as specified above:
