Today is Programmer Day, a day to celebrate programmers and thank them for all that they do, according to the Programmer Day site.
Programmer Day is celebrated on the 256th day of the year, which is Sept. 13—or Sept. 12 on leap years.
Launched in 2007, ProgrammerDay.info was created to make a virtual home for the holiday and is dedicated to spreading the word about Programmer Day and celebrating programmers worldwide.
Why is Programmer Day celebrated on the 256th day of the year? “A byte can have 256 possible values, bytes are very important to programmers,” the Programmer Day FAQ on the site reads. “Not because they are required for programs to work, but because the payroll system and Krispy Kreme doughnut cash registers require them.”
Some of the suggested potential ways to celebrate the day include speaking in code or pseudocode all day, decorating a tree with zeros and ones to make a binary tree, making Happy Programmer Day cards using ASCII art, having contests for the best binary pun or programming jokes, and having a programmer-themed cocktail.
Programmer Day comes a day after the App Developer Conference (ADC) opened up press registration for its inaugural ADC 2013 event, which will take place Nov. 5-7 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. ADC is a new event from the creators of the Game Developers Conference (GDC). ADC content will focus on the development, UI, marketing and business of apps outside of games. Co-located with the inaugural Game Developers Conference Next (GDC Next) about the future of games, ADC aims to bring app creators together to share their practices. The conference will feature speakers from Dropbox, DISH Network, tumblr, Evernote, App Annie, Six to Start (the creators of “Zombies, Run!”) and many others, including several yet to be announced.
Also new this month, the TIOBE Index, which illustrates the most popular programming languages used by developers, shows that Transact-SQL has cracked the top 10 for the first time, coming in at No. 10 on the list. It was ranked No. 14 in September 2012.
In addition, the R language and COBOL cracked the top 20. The R programming language and a software environment is used for statistical computing and graphics. R, which is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis, came in at No. 18 on the September TIOBE Index; it was No. 24 in September 2012.
COBOL, the longstanding universal programming language for business applications, came in at No. 20 on the September 2013 TIOBE Index. It was No. 25 on the index in September 2012.
The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month, and its ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses and third-party vendors. Popular search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu are used to calculate the ratings. TIOBE Software, which manages the TIOBE index, warns that it is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.