Code Words is an online publication about computer programming produced by the Recurse Center retreat community. It began publishing in December 2014, and has a quarterly schedule.
The journal features original work by participants at the center, including visiting “residents” and alumni. It is intended to “share the joyful approach to programming and learning that typifies” the community, and to be “accessible and useful to both new and seasoned programmers.” [1]
Topics commonly treated include the inner workings of programming tools such as Git; [2] [3] Computer Science concepts such as propositional logic, [4] data types, [5] and random forests; [6] and treatments of diverse problems encountered in actual programming.
The supervising editor is Rachel Honor Vincent, with individual articles co-edited by members of the community. Contributions are licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. [1]
Grace Brewster Hopper was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and the FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended to create COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.
Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimization, plotting functions and various types of data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other programming languages. It was conceived by Stephen Wolfram, and is developed by Wolfram Research of Champaign, Illinois. The Wolfram Language is the programming language used in Mathematica. Mathematica 1.0 was released on June 23, 1988 in Champaign, Illinois and Santa Clara, California.
D, also known as dlang, is a multi-paradigm system programming language created by Walter Bright at Digital Mars and released in 2001. Andrei Alexandrescu joined the design and development effort in 2007. Though it originated as a re-engineering of C++, D is a profoundly different language —features of D can be considered streamlined and expanded-upon ideas from C++, however D also draws inspiration from other high-level programming languages, notably Java, Python, Ruby, C#, and Eiffel.
OpenSSL is a software library for applications that provide secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping, and identify the party at the other end. It is widely used by Internet servers, including the majority of HTTPS websites.
Git is a distributed version control system that tracks changes in any set of computer files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.
TypeScript is a free and open-source high-level programming language developed by Microsoft that adds static typing with optional type annotations to JavaScript. It is designed for the development of large applications and transpiles to JavaScript. Because TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, all JavaScript programs are syntactically valid TypeScript, but they can fail to type-check for safety reasons.
QuickCheck is a software library, specifically a combinator library, originally written in the programming language Haskell, designed to assist in software testing by generating test cases for test suites – an approach known as property testing.
Cython is a programming language, a superset of the Python programming language, designed to give C-like performance with code that is written mostly in Python with optional additional C-inspired syntax.
GitHub, Inc. is a platform and cloud-based service for software development and version control using Git, allowing developers to store and manage their code. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
Go is a statically typed, compiled high-level programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It is syntactically similar to C, but also has memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency. It is often referred to as Golang because of its former domain name, golang.org
, but its proper name is Go.
Node.js is a cross-platform, open-source server environment that can run on Windows, Linux, Unix, macOS, and more. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment, runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine, and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser.
Haskell is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research, and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming language features such as type classes, which enable type-safe operator overloading, and monadic input/output (IO). It is named after logician Haskell Curry. Haskell's main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC).
scikit-learn is a free software machine learning library for the Python programming language. It features various classification, regression and clustering algorithms including support-vector machines, random forests, gradient boosting, k-means and DBSCAN, and is designed to interoperate with the Python numerical and scientific libraries NumPy and SciPy. Scikit-learn is a NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored project.
Julia is a high-level, general-purpose dynamic programming language. Its features are well suited for numerical analysis and computational science.
Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab, the Spark codebase was later donated to the Apache Software Foundation, which has maintained it since.
Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. and the open-source community. First released in June 2014, Swift was developed as a replacement for Apple's earlier programming language Objective-C, as Objective-C had been largely unchanged since the early 1980s and lacked modern language features. Swift works with Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, and a key aspect of Swift's design was the ability to interoperate with the huge body of existing Objective-C code developed for Apple products over the previous decades. It was built with the open source LLVM compiler framework and has been included in Xcode since version 6, released in 2014. On Apple platforms, it uses the Objective-C runtime library, which allows C, Objective-C, C++ and Swift code to run within one program.
Eclipse Deeplearning4j is a programming library written in Java for the Java virtual machine (JVM). It is a framework with wide support for deep learning algorithms. Deeplearning4j includes implementations of the restricted Boltzmann machine, deep belief net, deep autoencoder, stacked denoising autoencoder and recursive neural tensor network, word2vec, doc2vec, and GloVe. These algorithms all include distributed parallel versions that integrate with Apache Hadoop and Spark.
Nim is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, statically typed, compiled high-level systems programming language, designed and developed by a team around Andreas Rumpf. Nim is designed to be "efficient, expressive, and elegant", supporting metaprogramming, functional, message passing, procedural, and object-oriented programming styles by providing several features such as compile time code generation, algebraic data types, a foreign function interface (FFI) with C, C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript, and supporting compiling to those same languages as intermediate representations.
The Recurse Center is an independent educational institution, that, until the COVID-19 pandemic, combined a retreat for computer programmers with a recruiting agency. The retreat is an intentional community, a self-directed academic environment for programmers of all levels to improve their skills in, without charge. There is no curriculum and no particular programming languages or paradigms are institutionally favored; instead, participants work on open-source projects of their own choice, alone or collaboratively, as they see best. The Center has been an active advocate for women in programming. Since 2020 all programs have been conducted online.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.