Spotify has begun a global rollout of its audiobook service, extending availability from 22 to more than 180 countries by the end of 2026. The expansion grants access to over 350,000 titles in multiple languages, with some markets offering 12 hours of listening per month included in Premium subscriptions. Additionally, the company is enhancing its Page Match feature and expanding Audiobooks+ to more regions and plans, including student plans in select European countries.
9to5mac.com
· 2026-10-07
A commentary in Nature argues that when Indigenous languages disappear, the ecological and medicinal knowledge encoded within them is also lost, citing recent research on the topic. The authors note that language decline can be reversed, but say such revitalization efforts are largely absent from national legislation and policy frameworks.
nature.com
· 2026-09-29
A software commentator examines why Lisp code, with its uniform prefix notation and heavy parenthesization, is widely perceived as harder to read than C-style languages like Python or Java. The piece rejects the common Lisp community explanation that unreadability is purely a matter of unfamiliarity, and instead draws on cognitive science to propose a deeper structural cause tied to parenthesis placement.
paultm.nl
· 2026-09-28
A new opinion piece contends that programming languages are treated as fixed, sacred artifacts, forcing developers to build workaround build systems and conventions instead of directly modifying their languages. It cites Raymond Chen's 2005 blog post opposing 'flow-control macros,' which warned that such customizations obscure code semantics and complicate debugging, as an example of the resistance to language malleability.
jimmyhmiller.com
· 2026-09-25
Elixir creator José Valim published an essay examining how programming languages, their ecosystems and communities could change as AI agents take over more code writing. The piece is split into two parts: broader reflections on community and ecosystem effects, and concrete opinions on how developer tooling should adapt now that coding agents are using languages directly.
dashbit.co
· 2026-09-25
A new linguistic history explains that the letter W emerged from the upheaval following the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, when Germanic-speaking peoples—once relied on by Rome as foederati allies—rose to power across former imperial territory. These new rulers, despite speaking Germanic languages, chose to keep Latin as their administrative language to appear as legitimate successors to Roman authority, setting the stage for the eventual creation of W as scribes adapted Latin script to represent Germanic sounds.
lithub.com
· 2026-09-20
Microsoft has officially designated Rust as a Tier One language, granting it the same organizational priority and support as long-standing languages such as C++ and C#. This classification signals broader internal adoption across Microsoft's engineering teams and platforms, including Windows and Azure infrastructure.
developers.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-18
A programming-theory essay pushes back on the claim that any threaded function argument, such as Go's context.Context, qualifies as a 'function color' like async/await. The author argues that if every parameter counted as a color, the concept wouldn't have needed inventing decades after functions themselves existed, and proposes analyzing coloring instead as a question of how a change to one function propagates through the call graph to its callers.
jerf.org
· 2026-09-08
A two-part historical essay examines the intellectual roots of Hans Freudenthal's Lingua Cosmica, a language designed for communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence. The first installment traces its lineage back to 17th-century English efforts to build a universal 'philosophical language,' motivated by the practical chaos of European trade, diplomacy and colonial missionary work, and continuing through the rise of mathematical logic in the 20th century.
shellsandpebbles.com
· 2026-08-31
Samantha Brunhaver, an associate professor at Arizona State University, is leading an NSF-funded project examining how engineers develop adaptability on the job. Through interviews with managers, early-career employees, and undergraduates, she found that while adaptability is widely cited as essential, employers rarely define or teach it consistently, and its meaning shifts depending on the industry, from tool turnover in software to regulatory changes in aerospace or biomedical fields.
spectrum.ieee.org
· 2026-08-24
Canonical is funding a three-year PhD project at the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group aimed at automatically converting large C codebases into Rust. UK Research and Innovation is providing matching funds, and the project will be led by student Alex Wood under Professor Meng Wang, with Dr. Cristina David and Canonical's Jon Seager as co-supervisors.
developers.slashdot.org
· 2026-08-23
GoKawiil