It’s been a week (or three) of some doomsday-esque headlines about all-time, record-breaking warm weather, the potential for a pandemic, and the resulting dive of the stock market that has me pleading to the technological gods above for some solutions. Really, though, that question is partly an “is it possible or not” with a dash of “could somebody go ahead and fix this already” and a sprinkle of “can we trust technology to help?” I realize, of course, that technological implementation can generally be a pretty mixed bag when it comes to good intentions, follow through, and end results.

Technology does as we bid it do, whether we realize our bidding or not.

Programming will never advance, so long as we continue to view programming, debugging, and execution as separate activities. Alternatively: Compilers considered harmful. Python won via the REPL, but Excel is still king of accessible modeling. (h/t @rsnous for asking a good Q) — Peter Wang (@pwang) February 24, 2020

At the same time, I do retain some glimmer of hope in my daily-decreasingly technologically solutionistic soul. I think we can, I think we can, I think we can. (To wit: my graduating thesis of early 2002 was titled “Hypertext: An Emancipation of Textuality,” in which I argued that the internet, metadata, and things like Wikipedia were going to enable a new age of information freedom, brightening those dark corners of society and freeing them with context and insight. Oh, how it contrasts with the modern lived experience of browsing Twitter and Facebook and trying to discern truth from troll.)

Well, IBM for one is ready to throw its weight behind the idea of saving the world through code, with its 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge, a five-year, $30 million global initiative to rally developers to “use their skills and mastery of the latest technologies, and to create new ones, to drive positive and long-lasting change across the world with their code.” This year’s Call for Code has set its sights on climate change, just as Jeff Bezos did earlier this month with his creation of the $10B “Bezos Earth Fund,” this time “challenging applicants to create innovations based on open source technologies to help halt and reverse the impact of climate change.” Last year, says IBM, more than 180,000 participants from 165 nations created more than 5,000 applications focused on natural disaster preparedness and relief.

With climate change now totally taken care of (sarcasm!), let’s move on to the pandemic — ProgrammableWeb has an interesting little article looking at the various APIs available to track Coronavirus COVID-19, which it notes “can’t help cure the disease but they can be used by developers to collect data about the outbreak, track its spread, and even produce data visualizations.”

As for the stock market, well, y’all are alone on that one. So what are you waiting for? Go save the world already.

This Week in Programming

Firefox Turns to WebAssembly for Added Security: We’ve looked at issues faced by Microsoft and others as a result of memory insecurity in C and C++, and Firefox has turned to some of the same solutions, breaking code into multiple sandboxed processes with reduced privileges and rewriting it into a memory safe language like Rust. Now, Mozilla says they have added a third option, because process-level sandboxing requires a lot of system resources, while rewriting everything into Rust, well… you know. Millions of lines of code, and all that. So, they have instead turned to securing Firefox with WebAssembly (WASM) using RLBox, a new sandboxing technology that enables them to convert existing Firefox components to run inside a WASM sandbox. Essentially, this lets them take existing C/C++ code, compile it into WASM code, and then compile that into native code, all done ahead of time when Firefox itself is built using Cranelift, via the Bytecode Alliance’s Lucet compiler and runtime. This, they write, “enables sharing compiled native code between multiple processes, resulting in significant memory savings” and “improves the startup speed of the sandbox, which is important for fine-grained sandboxing.”

Seems like nearly every hot new thing in networking these days boils down to a new way to do configuration. Yawn. — Matt Oswalt (@Mierdin) February 27, 2020

Open source issues in a nutshell. pic.twitter.com/iT8fXGJG0B — 31.5 business travel per-diems (@freiksenet) February 26, 2020

I was thinking how much money I made as a professional developer by using a specific programming language. Here is my top ranking: 1. Go

2. Java

3. Objective-C

4. Python

5. JavaScript — Jaana Dogan 🌳 (@rakyll) February 27, 2020

SQL is a programming language. It's Turing complete. No more gate keeping SQL devs. Thank you 💙 https://t.co/7ijpaAwHC6 — Cher (@CHERdotdev) February 27, 2020

Amazon Web Services and MongoDB are sponsors of The New Stack.

Feature image: Aylien’s machine translation capabilities pull from hundreds of sources to offer an updated picture of COVID-19’s spread.