The open source R language has been in use by statisticians to do data analysis, predictive modeling and visualization for over a decade. This week, R is set to undergo a revolution of sorts with a revamped commercial effort.

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.

C represents more than 40% of all code written for open source software. But this figure comes from counting lines of code. What about Java and PHP, or C++?

Just one week shy of Christmas 2008, the Python world saw the release of version 3 of Python. Big deal, eh? Well ... it turns out it was and is, as Python 3 is the first major release of Python designed from the get-go to be incompatible with prior versions of the language.

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.

The past couple of years have seen an explosion of open source programming languages and utilities that are geared toward children. Many of these efforts are based around the idea that, since the days of BASIC, programming environments have become far too complex for untrained minds to wrap themselves around.

This time we chat with Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language and regarded as the father of modern scripting languages.

This week Python 3.0 was released, and it represents one of those rare instances: Python 3.0 was designed to clear up a lot of now-inertial legacy issues with the Python language and figure out good ways to do things now instead of unquestioningly sticking with what seemed like good ways (or, more often, the least painful ways) to do things five or ten years ago.