Slashdot reader destinyland writes: On April 7th, a Trump campaign advisor told the Los Angeles Times "One way we still win this election is by turning it into a referendum on China." Within weeks the Washington Post noted "reports that the Trump administration has sought to pressure U.S. intelligence agencies to search for proof of a link between the Wuhan lab and the covid-19 outbreak." And that same month selected portions of two diplomatic cables from 2018 were leaked to the Washington Post, and published in a controversial "opinion piece."

The Post requested "expedited processing" for the release of the complete text of both cables — a routine request which was nevertheless denied. (Though a virologist at Columbia University shared a rebuttal in memes.) The complete text of the cables has now been released — and the additional information undercuts the story line that the lab — which was located a full nine miles from the market at the center of the outbreak — was anything less than safe. Though the Post's opinion piece had highlighted a clause about "a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory" — the diplomats had actually been concerned instead that the shortage would interfere with the lab's productivity and utilization — and not it's safety.

And there was apparently more information in the cable which was withheld. CNN reports:

The January 2018 cable, obtained by the Washington Post after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, noted that ties between the WIV and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston could help alleviate the shortage and that, reportedly, the US-based institution was training technicians to work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). A second cable about the WIV from April 2018 cited a French official who said that "French experts have provided guidance and biosafety training to the lab, which will continue...."

Back in April a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development surmised the misleading excerpts from the cables had come from "an administration official with an obvious axe to grind." And this weekend the Columbia University virologist reacted to what the cable's full text revealed about the high safety standards at the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

"This cable says NOTHING about concerns with the work that was being done at WIV. The supposedly worrisome work was actually presented as a success story in a lab that was coming online more slowly than everyone — including the US authors of the cable — expected or hoped."

CNN shares some bad news. "After people are infected with the novel coronavirus, their natural immunity to the virus could decline within months, a new pre-print paper suggests." The paper was co-authored by 37 researchers from seven different institutions: The paper, released on the medical server medrxiv.org on Saturday and not yet published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, suggests that antibody responses may start to decline 20 to 30 days after Covid-19 symptoms emerge. Antibodies are the proteins the body makes to fight infection...

Since early on in the pandemic, the World Health Organization has warned that people who have had Covid-19 are not necessarily immune from getting the virus again. Yet the new study had some limitations, including that more research is needed to determine whether similar results would emerge among a larger group of patients and what data could show over longer periods of time when it comes to infection with the coronavirus...
"The report is the latest in a growing chain of evidence that immunity to COVID-19 is short-lived," reports the San Francisco Chronicle: A Chinese study published June 18 in the journal Nature Medicine also showed coronavirus antibodies taking a nosedive. The study of 74 patients, conducted by Chongqing Medical University, a branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, showed that more than 90% exhibited sharp declines in the number of antibodies within two to three months after infection... Studies of four seasonal coronaviruses that cause colds show that although people develop antibodies, the immune response declines over time and people become susceptible again. Scientists suspect that the severity of cold symptoms is reduced by previous infections.
The Chronicle reports this new information suggests two implications:

• "Waning antibodies affect vaccine development," said Shannon Bennett, the chief of science at San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences. "Where natural immunity doesn't really develop or last, then vaccine programs are not likely to be easily successful or achievable..."

• The Chronicle adds, "Whatever happens, epidemiologists hope the recent reports about antibody viability put to rest the concept embraced by many young people of herd immunity, where the disease can't find any more victims because so many people have survived infections and must be immune. 'This attitude that if I go out there and just get exposed — get it over with — then I'll be immune is a dangerous presumption,' Bennett said. Now more than ever."

Today I learned that Microsoft "has been providing support for the development and building of the PHP programming language on Windows," according to Bleeping Computer. "This support includes developing security patches for PHP and creating native Windows builds."

But that's going to change: Microsoft has announced that it will not offer support in 'any capacity' for PHP for Windows 8.0 when it is released... To add some clarity to Microsoft PHP Windows Lead Dale Hirt's post, PHP Release Manager Sara Golemon posted to Reddit explaining that this does not mean PHP 8.0 will not be supported in Windows. It just means that Microsoft will not be the one building and supporting it. "For some possibly missing context, Microsoft runs https://windows.php.net and produces all the official builds of PHP for Windows... This message means Microsoft aren't going to produce official builds for PHP 8 onwards. This message does NOT mean that nobody will."

Microsoft has not stated why they will no longer support PHP 8.0, but it could be due to the extensive PHP support already existing in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Microsoft has been actively developing WSL, which allows users to install various Linux distributions that run directly in Windows 10.

As these distributions already support PHP 7.4 and will support PHP 8.0 when released, Microsoft may see it as unnecessary to continue supporting a native PHP build in Windows.

"Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some choice words today on Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) found on select Intel processors," reports Phoronix: In a mailing list discussion stemming from the Phoronix article this week on the compiler instructions Intel is enabling for Alder Lake (and Sapphire Rapids), Linus Torvalds chimed in. The Alder Lake instructions being flipped on in GCC right now make no mention of AVX-512 but only AVX2 and others, likely due to Intel pursuing the subset supported by both the small and large cores in this new hybrid design being pursued.

The lack of seeing AVX512 for Alder Lake led Torvalds to comment:

I hope AVX512 dies a painful death, and that Intel starts fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on.

I hope Intel gets back to basics: gets their process working again, and concentrate more on regular code that isn't HPC or some other pointless special case.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: in the heyday of x86, when Intel was laughing all the way to the bank and killing all their competition, absolutely everybody else did better than Intel on FP loads. Intel's FP performance sucked (relatively speaking), and it matter not one iota.

Because absolutely nobody cares outside of benchmarks.

The same is largely true of AVX512 now - and in the future...
After several more paragraphs, Torvalds reaches his conclusion. "Stop with the special-case garbage, and make all the core common stuff that everybody cares about run as well as you humanly can."

Phoronix notes that Torvalds' comments came "just weeks after he switched to AMD Ryzen Threadripper for his primary development rig."

The R programming language is experiencing a surge in popularity "in the slipstream of Python," according to this month's TIOBE index, leaping into the top ten.

"For historical context, we wrote of R's spot in TIOBE nearly two years ago, and it had just made the leap from #50 to #39," writes programming columnist Mike Melanson.

ZDNet writes: In May, when R crashed out of the top 20 for the first time in three years, Tiobe speculated that the language could be a victim of consolidation in statistical programming, with more developers in the field gravitating towards Python.
But there's been a lot of motion since then, Tech Republic reports: R rose one space to eighth place in July, but its comparison to 2019 is where the real surprise lies: It was in 20th place at the same time last year. TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen cites two reasons why R may be increasing in popularity:

- Universities and research institutes have moved away from commercial statistical languages like SAS and Stata in favor of open source languages Python and R.

- The increase in analytics being used to search for a COVID-19 vaccine....

The largest gainers in popularity between July 2019 and July 2020 are Go, which jumped from 16th to 12th place, Perl, jumping from No. 19 to No. 14, Scratch, jumping from No. 30 to No. 17, Rust, which moved from No. 33 to No. 18, and PL/SQL, which moved from No. 23 to No. 19.

Ruby fell the most, moving from 11th place to 16th, while SQL, MATLAB, and Assembly Language also slipped down the list.
ZDNet adds that "Besides R's upwards shift, Tiobe's July index doesn't show much movement in the popularity of the top languages. The top 10 in descending order are C, Java, Python, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, R, PHP and Swift."

Visual Studio magazine argues that the biggest surprise may be that the 29-year-old language classic Visual Basic is still in the top 20 — since its last stable release was 22 years ago, and by 2008 it was finally retired by Microsoft. "VB6 just refuses to go away, achieving cult-like status among a group of hard-core supporters."

According to a report from a South Korean publication, Samsung is working on Galaxy Fold Lite for as cheap as $900. Samsung will reportedly cut costs by downgrading the camera capabilities and internal specifications. Bleeping Computer reports: The Galaxy Fold Lite will reportedly launch in 2021, but remember that this is just a rumor out of South Korea and it has to be taken with a grain of salt. It appears that the foldable device was planned to be announced during the August 5 event, but Samsung has reportedly postponed its launch to 2021. Galaxy Fold Lite is certainly possible and it was recently tipped off by XDA-Developers' Max Weinbach on Twitter. Another leaker revealed that the Galaxy Fold e could be named Galaxy Gold Lite and priced below $1100.

Sweden's population is not quite twice the size of Norway's — yet Sweden has reported 21 times as many deaths from Covid-19, prompting many countries to close their borders to Sweden, reports the New York Times: Norway isn't the only Scandinavian neighbor barring Swedes from visiting this summer. Denmark and Finland have also closed their borders to Swedes, fearing that they would bring new coronavirus infections with them. While those countries went into strict lockdowns this spring, Sweden famously refused, and now has suffered roughly twice as many infections and five times as many deaths as the other three nations combined, according to figures compiled by The New York Times. While reporting differences can make comparisons inexact, the overall trend is clear, as is Sweden's new status as Scandinavia's pariah state...

"When you see 5,000 deaths in Sweden and 230 in Norway, it is quite incredible," said Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway and the former director of the World Health Organization, during a digital lecture at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in May...

Swedes now find themselves with few options for moving about the European Union. Most countries in the bloc have reopened their borders to member nations, but only France, Italy, Spain and Croatia are welcoming Swedes without restrictions.
On a popular Scandinavian radio program, a journalist with a leading Swedish paper complained about how Sweden was being treated by its neighboring countries, according to the Times. "We are supposed to sit here in our corner of shame, and the worst part is that you're savoring it."

The BBC notes that just days later, on Wednesday, Sweden reported 1,610 new infections — roughly one infection for every 6,354 people in Sweden and its highest number of daily infections since the outbreak began.

Taking place this week is the virtual Perl + Raku "Conference in the Cloud" as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic causing the event to go virtual. A big announcement out of it is Perl 7. From a report: Perl 7 basically amounts to Perl 5 with more modern defaults and foregoing some of the extensive backward compatibility support found with Perl 5. News of Perl 7 comes a few days after the release of Perl 5.32. Perl 7 succeeds Perl 5 due to the Perl 6 initiative previously for what is now known as the Raku programming language. So to avoid confusion, similar to the PHP 6 debacle, Perl 7 is the next version. For the most part though Perl 7 is close to Perl 5.32 with changed defaults and is more forward looking with less commitment to backward compatibility support.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: When the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County shut down due to the pandemic in mid-March, Lisa Gonzalez headed home with the expectation that she would be back in a few weeks. But once it became clear that she wouldn't get back anytime soon, Gonzalez, the museum's assistant entomology collection manager, converted her home's craft room into a makeshift lab. Then she began sifting through thousands of insects the museum had previously collected via a citizen science project. [...] Using just her own microscope, Gonzalez identified dozens of insect species by looking at features like tiny hairs or the shape of a fly's wings. She also found some unusual insects that she turned over to her colleague, Brian Brown, the museum's curator of entomology. Using a larger Leica stereoscope that he hauled in from the office, as well as a smaller compound microscope he found on craigslist, Brown discovered nine species of small flies, all new to science. "It's always cool to find new things, and it is one of the great joys of this job," says Brown. "It's not just finding slightly different new things -- we find extravagantly different things all the time."

The insects, mostly small flies, wasps, and wasplike flies, had been collected through the BioSCAN project, which began in 2012 with insect traps set at 30 sites throughout Los Angeles, mostly in backyards or public spaces. The pair recruited volunteers who were then trained in how to use the "Malaise traps," which resemble two-person pup tents that force bugs to fly upward into collecting nets before the volunteers can put them into vials. The BioSCAN project started when Brown bet a museum trustee that he could find a new species of insect in her backyard in West LA. He did, and the project took off. In its first three years, Brown and the backyard collector discovered 30 new species of insects and published their results. The museum team found an additional 13 new species in the past two years, plus he and the staff have discovered nine more since the pandemic shutdown. "The nine new species include phorid flies, some of which are known for their ability to run across surfaces and or enter coffins to consume dead bodies," the report adds. "Brown and Gonzalez have also found botflies, parasites of rats and wasplike flies that have never been seen before in Southern California. They likely arrived from Central America, perhaps hitching a ride on a flowering plant or piece of food."

"With the help of tens of thousands of insects collected through the BioSCAN project, over the years Brown and Gonzalez have expanded the count of known insect species in the Los Angeles basin from 3,500 during the last census in 1993 to around 20,000 today."

New submitter bmimatt shares a report from Krebs On Security: Hundreds of thousands of potentially sensitive files from police departments across the United States were leaked online last week. The collection, dubbed "BlueLeaks" and made searchable online, stems from a security breach at a Texas web design and hosting company that maintains a number of state law enforcement data-sharing portals. The collection -- nearly 270 gigabytes in total -- is the latest release from Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), an alternative to Wikileaks that publishes caches of previously secret data.

In a post on Twitter, DDoSecrets said the BlueLeaks archive indexes "ten years of data from over 200 police departments, fusion centers and other law enforcement training and support resources," and that "among the hundreds of thousands of documents are police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more." KrebsOnSecurity obtained an internal June 20 analysis by the National Fusion Center Association (NFCA), which confirmed the validity of the leaked data. The NFCA alert noted that the dates of the files in the leak actually span nearly 24 years -- from August 1996 through June 19, 2020 -- and that the documents include names, email addresses, phone numbers, PDF documents, images, and a large number of text, video, CSV and ZIP files. The NFCA said it appears the data published by BlueLeaks was taken after a security breach at Netsential, a Houston-based web development firm.

Researchers have found that soap bubbles can carry pollen grains and deposit them on flowers. CNET reports: "It sounds somewhat like fantasy, but the functional soap bubble allows effective pollination and assures that the quality of fruits is the same as with conventional hand pollination," said Eijiro Miyako, associate professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and lead author of a study published in the journal iScience on Wednesday.

The researchers first worked out that soap bubbles could indeed carry pollen. They then tested out different bubble formulations and settled on lauramidopropyl betain, a compound sometimes used in shampoos, as a good vehicle. Now comes the fun part. The researchers used a bubble gun on a pear orchard, "producing fruit that demonstrated the pollination's success," iScience publisher Cell Press said in a release. They also tested out the use of a drone to direct bubbles at flowers, which proved to be an accurate way to deliver the bubbles. The early experiments are promising, but there are still some hurdles around figuring out the most precise way to aim the bubbles and how to deal with potential weather issues like rain or wind.

"A new modeling study out of Cambridge and Greenwich universities suggests that face masks may be even more important than originally thought in preventing future outbreaks of the new coronavirus," reports SFGate: To ward off resurgences, the reproduction number for the virus (the average number of people who will contract it from one infected person) needs to drop below 1.0. Researchers don't believe that's achievable with lockdowns alone. However, a combination of lockdowns and widespread mask compliance might do the trick, they say. "We show that, when face masks are used by the public all the time (not just from when symptoms first appear), the effective reproduction number, Re, can be decreased below 1, leading to the mitigation of epidemic spread," the scientists wrote in the paper published Wednesday by the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

The modeling indicated that when lockdown periods are combined with 100% face mask use, disease spread is vastly diminished, preventing resurgence for 18 months, the time frame that has frequently been cited for developing a vaccine. It also demonstrated that if people wear masks in public, it is twice as effective at reducing the R number than if face coverings are only worn after symptoms appear.

The masks don't have to be top-of-the-line surgical or respirator masks. Homemade coverings that catch only 50 percent of exhaled droplets would provide a "population-level benefit," they concluded.
Another review funded by the World Health Organization and published in the journal Lancet also concluded "that data from 172 observational studies indicate wearing face masks reduces the risk of coronavirus infection," according to the Washington Post.

A former director of America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday, "It's a lot less economically disruptive to wear a mask than to shut society, so I can't understand some of the resistance to mask wearing."

jrepin writes: The KDE community has released Plasma 5.19, the popular free and open-source desktop environment. "In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience," reads the announcement. For a complete list of what's new, you can visit the Plasma 5.19 changelog.

sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: The classic eye exam may be about to get an upgrade. Researchers have developed an online vision test — fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) — that produces much more accurate diagnoses than the sheet of capital letters we've been staring at since the 19th century. If perfected, the test could also help patients with eye diseases track their vision at home...

[W]hen the researchers ran their "Stanford acuity test" (StAT) through 1000 computer simulations mimicking real patients, the diagnostic reduced error by 74% compared with the classic eye test, the team reports this month in the Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The simulations work by starting with a known acuity score and factors in the types of mistakes a human might make. It then virtually "takes" the different eye tests in order to compare how accurate they are. The team used this instead of actual patients because it starts with the "true" acuity — something unknown in a human.

You can take StAT yourself at myeyes.ai, although the team cautions that the test isn't meant to replace doctor visits just yet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Last week the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported something extraordinary. For the first time in 135 years, last year U.S. consumption of renewables surpassed consumption of coal. There are two interrelated reasons for this: The collapse of coal consumption over the past decade, which was fueled by the rise of cheaper alternatives. I have covered the reasons for coal's collapse previously. The short version is that policies to curb carbon emissions were put in place about the same time the shale boom and renewable power revolutions created cheaper, cleaner alternatives to coal. The graphic above shows the surge in renewables that helped collapse coal demand. This surge is better shown by the following graphic, which highlights the three categories of modern renewables that have driven the consumption surge: Wind power, solar power, and biofuels. The report points out that fossil fuels still dominate our energy consumption. "Last year the U.S. consumed 11.3 quadrillion BTUs (quads) of coal and 11.5 quads of renewables," adds Forbes. "But we also consumed 36.7 quads of petroleum and 32.1 quads of natural gas. Each of these categories of fossil fuel consumption was greater than our combined consumption of renewables and coal, which provides a broader perspective on our energy consumption."

"In total, the U.S. consumed 80.5 quads of fossil fuels, 11.5 quads of renewables, and 8.5 quads of nuclear power. Renewables represented 11.4% of U.S. energy consumption in 2019, versus 8.1% a decade ago."

"The Linux kernel has officially deprecated its coding style that the length of lines of code comply with 80 columns as the 'strong preferred limit'," reports Phoronix: The Linux kernel like many long-standing open-source projects has a coding style guideline that lines of code be 80 columns or less, but now that while still recommended is no longer going to be enforced. This stems from Linus Torvalds commenting on Friday that excessive linebreaks are bad and he is against ugly wrapped code that is strictly sticking to 80 characters per line. This is part of the broader trend that most are no longer using 80x25 terminals...

This deprecation involves updating the documentation on the kernel's coding style to be more sensible and updating the checkpatch.pl script that checks patches to no longer have a max line length of 80. Instead, the check patch script is using a maximum line length of 100.
Torvalds noted Friday that spreading code over multiple lines created problems for single-line utilities like grep, while longer lines "are fundamentally useful..." [H]onestly, I don't want to see patches that make the kernel reading experience worse for me and likely for the vast majority of people, based on the argument that some odd people have small terminal windows... If you or Christoph have 80 character lines, you'll get possibly ugly wrapped output. Tough. That's _your_ choice. Your hardware limitations shouldn't be a pain for the rest of us...

So no. I do not care about somebody with a 80x25 terminal window getting line wrapping. For exactly the same reason I find it completely irrelevant if somebody says that their kernel compile takes 10 hours because they are doing kernel development on a Raspberry PI with 4GB of RAM. People with restrictive hardware shouldn't make it more inconvenient for people who have better resources...

If you choose to use a 80-column terminal, you can live with the line wrapping. It's just that simple.
"Yes, staying withing 80 columns is certainly still _preferred_," notes the official commit message for this change. "But it's not the hard limit that the checkpatch warnings imply, and other concerns can most certainly dominate. Increase the default limit to 100 characters. Not because 100 characters is some hard limit either, but that's certainly a 'what are you doing' kind of value and less likely to be about the occasional slightly longer lines.'"

"We're less than 10 meters away..."

"@AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug are suited up, strapped in their seats and ready to be welcomed by the crew aboard the @Space_Station," NASA tweeted an hour ago.

They're now just 135 meters away from the space station, and you can watch the docking live on YouTube.

1,024,406 people are already watching...

"NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken reported that the capsule was performing beautifully, as they closed in for the docking," reports the Associated Press. "The gleaming white capsule was easily visible from the station, its nose cone open exposing its docking hook, as the two spacecraft zoomed a few miles apart above the Atlantic, then Africa, then Asia." It's the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft is carrying crew to the orbiting lab. Hurley, the Dragon's commander, prepared to take manual control for a brief test, then shift the capsule into automatic for the linkup, 19 hours after liftoff. In case of a problem, the astronauts slipped back into their pressurized launch suits for the docking. The three space station residents trained cameras on the incoming capsule for flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, as well as NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
UPDATE: At 7:16 PST, soft capture was successfully completed. We are now "moments away" from their boarding, with an official "welcoming ceremony" expected to happen soon.

The Los Angeles Times tells the story of 63-year-old Harry Sentoso, an Amazon warehouse worker who was called back to work on March 29th -- and died two weeks later of Covid-19. Across the country, Amazon workers have documented more than 1,000 cases among warehouse workers as of May 20, and 7 deaths. Sentoso is the eighth.... The company has put new measures in place to make its warehouses safer for employees, but the number of cases at its facilities keeps rising... Amazon also fired two tech workers who had publicly criticized safety and working conditions at the company's warehouses...

The week before Sentoso died, the company began requiring employees to wear masks on site, and started checking the temperature of workers before they could enter. It began requiring employees to stay six feet apart in late March, and staggered shifts and canceled in-person meetings to make that easier. The company has increased the frequency of cleaning and disinfecting in warehouses as well, and began spraying down whole facilities with disinfectant fogs in mid-April.

But [the late Harry Sentoso's son] Evan, and a contingent of Amazon workers across the country, don't think that those measures are enough. Hundreds of workers at Amazon's facilities in Hawthorne and Eastvale, in Riverside County, have signed and submitted petitions asking the company to close the facilities for two weeks after infections for thorough cleaning and send workers home with quarantine pay. Following worker complaints compiled by the Warehouse Workers Resource Center, Cal OSHA has also launched investigations into both facilities...

The call for a shutdown has been especially loud at warehouses in Pennsylvania and New York that have become coronavirus hotspots, with more than 60 reported cases at each before the company stopped updating the tally even to local employees.

Long-time Slashdot reader Tim the Gecko writes: Google's IPv6 connectivity stats topped 32% last Saturday for the first time.

But the main story has been the midweek stats. Most mobile phone networks and a good chunk of residential broadband have migrated to IPv6, but the typical corporate network where people used to spend their 9 to 5 is largely IPv4-only. There used to be a big dip in the IPv6 stats during the working week, but widespread working from home has halved that dip, with the typical midweek IPv6 connectivity for Google queries moving upwards from 26% to 29%.

Looking at this graph will be a good way of checking how fast people are returning to the office.

Stack Overflow has released the results of its 2020 survey of nearly 65,000 developers, revealing their favorite and most dreaded programming languages, tools and frameworks. From a news writeup: The survey shows that TypeScript, Microsoft's superset of the widely-used JavaScript programming language, has overtaken Python as the second most beloved programming language behind Rust. This year 86% of respondents say they are keen to use Rust, while 67.1% want to use TypeScript, and 66.7% want to use Python. Stack Overflow attributes TypeScript's rising popularity to Microsoft's embrace of open source software as well as the existence of larger and more complex JavaScript and Node.js codebases.

Rust has been the most loved programming language for five years running, despite few developers having experience with it. This year, just 5.1% developers report having used Rust, compared with the 68% who use JavaScript, which is the most commonly used language. [...] Meanwhile, the top 10 most dreaded programming languages are VBA, Objective-C, Perl, Assembly, C, PHP, Ruby, C++, Java and R.

The report also looks at average salaries of each developer role. In the US, engineering managers attract the highest salary at $152,000 per year, followed by site reliability engineers who earn $140,000 per year. Salaries across the globe for these roles are lower, at $92,000 for an engineering manager and $80,000 for a site reliability engineer. Other high-paying roles with an average salary of at least $115,000 in the US include data scientist and machine learning specialist, DevOps specialist, engineer, back-end developer, embedded application developers, mobile developers, scientist, desktop application developer, and educator.