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104-736: The goal of a hackathon is to create functioning software or hardware by the end of the event. Hackathons tend to have a specific focus, which can include the programming language used, the operating system , an application, an API , or the subject and the demographic group of the programmers. In other cases, there is no restriction on the type of software being created or the design of the new system. In addition to creating functional software or hardware, hackathons can help participants develop skills like problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, team work, communication and time management. Hackathons can also lead to formation of new companies, finding innovative solutions to real-world problems, or building

208-406: A heap and automatic garbage collection . For the next decades, Lisp dominated artificial intelligence applications. In 1978, another functional language, ML , introduced inferred types and polymorphic parameters . After ALGOL (ALGOrithmic Language) was released in 1958 and 1960, it became the standard in computing literature for describing algorithms . Although its commercial success

312-400: A logic called a type system . Other forms of static analyses like data flow analysis may also be part of static semantics. Programming languages such as Java and C# have definite assignment analysis , a form of data flow analysis, as part of their respective static semantics. Once data has been specified, the machine must be instructed to perform operations on the data. For example,

416-467: A type system , variables , and mechanisms for error handling . An implementation of a programming language is required in order to execute programs, namely an interpreter or a compiler . An interpreter directly executes the source code, while a compiler produces an executable program. Computer architecture has strongly influenced the design of programming languages, with the most common type ( imperative languages —which implement operations in

520-506: A certain demographic group, like teenagers, college students, or women. Hackathons at colleges have become increasingly popular, in the United States and elsewhere. These are usually annual or semiannual events that are open to college students at all universities. They are often competitive, with awards provided by the university or programming-related sponsors. Many of them are supported by the organization Major League Hacking, which

624-568: A community around particular technology or cause. The word "hackathon" is a portmanteau of the words "hack" and "marathon", where "hack" is used in the sense of exploratory programming, not its alternate meaning as a reference to breaching computer security . OpenBSD 's apparent first use of the term referred to a cryptographic development event held in Calgary on June 4, 1999, where ten developers came together to avoid legal problems caused due to export regulations of cryptographic software from

728-447: A data type whose elements, in many languages, must consist of a single type of fixed length. Other languages define arrays as references to data stored elsewhere and support elements of varying types. Depending on the programming language, sequences of multiple characters, called strings , may be supported as arrays of characters or their own primitive type . Strings may be of fixed or variable length, which enables greater flexibility at

832-414: A game has pre-defined effects outside the game system A social network game may employ any of the following features: Since social network games are often less challenging than console games and they have relatively shorter game play, they use different techniques to stretch game play and tools to retain users. Continuous goals: The games assign specific goals for users to achieve. As they advance in

936-436: A good return on investment for advertisers. Video ads are shown either in in-game interstitials (e.g. when the game is loading a new screen) or through incentive-based advertising, i.e. you will get either an in-game reward or Facebook credits for watching an advertisement. A brand or product will be injected in a game in some way. Due to the variety of ways in which product placement can be accomplished in any media, and because

1040-445: A hackathon for music-related software and hardware applications, is a popular event, having been held over 30 times around the world since 2009. Also Music Tech Fest , a three-day interdisciplinary festival for music ideas bringing together musicians with hackers, researchers and industry, features a hackathon. Similarly, Science Hack Day , a hackathon for making things with science, has been held over 45 times in over 15 countries around

1144-423: A limited amount of time. These are increasingly being used to deliver insights in big public and private datasets in various disciplines including business, healthcare news media and for social causes. There have been hackathons devoted to creating applications that use a specific language or framework, like JavaScript , Node.js , HTML5 and Ruby on Rails . Some hackathons focus on applications that make use of

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1248-422: A meaning to a grammatically correct sentence or the sentence may be false: The following C language fragment is syntactically correct, but performs operations that are not semantically defined (the operation *p >> 4 has no meaning for a value having a complex type and p->im is not defined because the value of p is the null pointer ): If the type declaration on the first line were omitted,

1352-709: A number of hackathons devoted to improving government, and specifically to the cause of open government . One such event, in 2011, was hosted by the United States Congress . Starting in 2012, NASA has been annually hosting the International Space Apps Challenge . In 2014, the British government and HackerNest ran DementiaHack, the world's first hackathon dedicated to improving the lives of people living with dementia and their caregivers. The series continues in 2015, adding

1456-527: A panel of judges select the winning teams, and prizes are given. At many hackathons, the judges are made up of organisers and sponsors. At BarCamp -style hackathons, that are organised by the development community, such as iOSDevCamp, the judges are usually made up of peers and colleagues in the field. Such prizes are sometimes a substantial amount of money: a social gaming hackathon at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference offered $ 250,000 in funding to

1560-606: A problem. The use of hackathon participants as de facto unpaid laborers by some commercial ventures has been criticized as exploitative. High-profile hackathons have also been the object of controversies. A team at the September 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon presented the TitStare app, which allowed users to post and view pictures of men staring at women's cleavage. TechCrunch issued an apology later that day. A November 2013 hackathon run by Salesforce.com, billed as having

1664-491: A quality app focused on fun while leaving the edges of the game open for branding. This allows developers to market their game to companies that can find new and interesting ways to bond with, expand, or sell to their audience. Large established corporations are using social gaming to build brand awareness and engagement. The Walt Disney Company's Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers was developed to create awareness of Disney's theme parks and also promote conservation. The gameplay

1768-632: A series of anti-crisis hackathons Hack the Crisis, with first to happen in Estonia, followed up by Poland, Latvia, and Ukraine. Beginning in 2020, the Michal Sela Forum has run hackathons to develop technology to help prevent domestic violence . A number of hackathons around the world have been planned in memory of computer programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz , who died in 2013. Some hackathons are intended only for programmers within

1872-636: A short period of time, does not involve as much violence as traditional video games, and is easier to grasp. Other games target certain demographics that use social media, such as Pot Farm creating a community by involving elements of cannabis subculture in its gameplay. A social network video game is a client-server application. The client in the web era was implemented with a mix of web technologies like Flash , HTML5 , PHP and JavaScript . When mobile games moved to mobile, social game front ends were developed using mobile platform technologies like Java , Objective-C , Swift and C++ . The back-end

1976-673: A smaller scale, looking specifically at the challenges of field work based geography education, the Field Studies Council hosted FSCHackday. Random Hacks of Kindness is another popular hackathon, devoted to disaster management and crisis response. ThePort instead is a hackathon devoted to solving humanitarian, social and public interest challenges. It's hosted by CERN with partners from other non-governmental organizations such as ICRC and UNDP . In March 2020, numerous world-wide initiatives led by entrepreneurs and governmental representatives from European countries resulted in

2080-399: A specified order) developed to perform well on the popular von Neumann architecture . While early programming languages were closely tied to the hardware , over time they have developed more abstraction to hide implementation details for greater simplicity. Thousands of programming languages—often classified as imperative, functional , logic , or object-oriented —have been developed for

2184-608: A wide variety of uses. Many aspects of programming language design involve tradeoffs—for example, exception handling simplifies error handling, but at a performance cost. Programming language theory is the subfield of computer science that studies the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of programming languages. Programming languages differ from natural languages in that natural languages are used for interaction between people, while programming languages are designed to allow humans to communicate instructions to machines. The term computer language

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2288-615: Is Empire Avenue , a virtual stock exchange where players buy and sell shares of each other's social network worth. In Empire Avenue , a player's worth is linked to his or her social media influence and activity, as well as that of the other players he or she has invested virtual currency in. This game design promotes social media interaction as a means to attaining higher value in Empire Avenue market rankings. Gamers will be able to purchase in game items like power-ups, avatar accessories, or decorative items users purchase within

2392-406: Is a set of allowable values and operations that can be performed on these values. Each programming language's type system defines which data types exist, the type of an expression , and how type equivalence and type compatibility function in the language. According to type theory , a language is fully typed if the specification of every operation defines types of data to which the operation

2496-415: Is allowed, the fewer type errors can be detected. Early programming languages often supported only built-in, numeric types such as the integer (signed and unsigned) and floating point (to support operations on real numbers that are not integers). Most programming languages support multiple sizes of floats (often called float and double ) and integers depending on the size and precision required by

2600-905: Is an annual event that started in 2008 targeted at advancing standards to enable interoperable bioinformatics tools and Web services. Neuroscientists have also used hackathons to bring developers and scientists together to address issues that range from focusing on a specific information system (e.g., Neurosynth Hackathon and the Allen Brain Atlas Hackathon) and providing reserved time for broad scientific inquiry (e.g., Brainhack), to using specific challenges that focus hacking activity (e.g., HBM Hackathon). There has been an emergence of 'datathons' or data-focused hackathons in recent years. These events challenge data scientists working with others attending to together use creativity and data analysis skills and platforms to build, test and explore solutions and dashboards which analyse huge datasets in

2704-419: Is applicable. In contrast, an untyped language, such as most assembly languages , allows any operation to be performed on any data, generally sequences of bits of various lengths. In practice, while few languages are fully typed, most offer a degree of typing. Because different types (such as integers and floats ) represent values differently, unexpected results will occur if one type is used when another

2808-474: Is divided evenly between two main elements, finding hidden object and large assortment of animals, and also includes simulation for players to build their own nature preserve. Players are expected to work with friends to collect the necessary materials to grow their habitat, while the hidden object element set players to compete for the highest score in their social setting. Some large established video games developers are acquiring small operators to capitalize on

2912-469: Is expected. Type checking will flag this error, usually at compile time (runtime type checking is more costly). With strong typing , type errors can always be detected unless variables are explicitly cast to a different type. Weak typing occurs when languages allow implicit casting—for example, to enable operations between variables of different types without the programmer making an explicit type conversion. The more cases in which this type coercion

3016-544: Is held annually as an outreach activity of the campus's Curtis Laws Wilson Library . ShamHacks 2018 focused on problem statements to better quality of life factors for US veterans, by pairing with veteran-owned company sponsors. Some companies hold internal hackathons to promote new product innovation by the engineering staff. For example, Facebook's Like button was conceived as part of a hackathon. Some hackathons (such as StartupBus , founded in 2010 in Australia) combine

3120-490: Is independent from individual players' game and play sessions Game time progresses according to real time, but in discrete steps Game play events initiated by specific real time events occurring Rules of a game instance change as gameplay takes place Players are encouraged to return frequently to a certain part of game space The need to perform a certain task considered easy repeatedly Designed support to handle players entering and leaving ongoing game sessions Parts of

3224-441: Is low, they tend to be priced at bottom-of-the-barrel CPMs of around $ 2. However, because social games generate so many page views, they are the biggest part of advertising revenue for the social gaming industry. Videos are the ad format with the most revenue per view. They tend to be higher-priced, either by CPMs ($ 35+ CPM in social games) or cost-per-completed-view. According to studies, video ads result in highest brand recall thus

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3328-403: Is often used to specify the execution semantics of languages commonly used in practice. A significant amount of academic research goes into formal semantics of programming languages , which allows execution semantics to be specified in a formal manner. Results from this field of research have seen limited application to programming language design and implementation outside academia. A data type

3432-444: Is sometimes used interchangeably with "programming language". However, usage of these terms varies among authors. In one usage, programming languages are described as a subset of computer languages. Similarly, the term "computer language" may be used in contrast to the term "programming language" to describe languages used in computing but not considered programming languages – for example, markup languages . Some authors restrict

3536-474: Is stored. The simplest user-defined type is an ordinal type whose values can be mapped onto the set of positive integers. Since the mid-1980s, most programming languages also support abstract data types , in which the representation of the data and operations are hidden from the user , who can only access an interface . The benefits of data abstraction can include increased reliability, reduced complexity, less potential for name collision , and allowing

3640-442: Is the potential for errors to go undetected. Complete type inference has traditionally been associated with functional languages such as Haskell and ML . With dynamic typing, the type is not attached to the variable but only the value encoded in it. A single variable can be reused for a value of a different type. Although this provides more flexibility to the programmer, it is at the cost of lower reliability and less ability for

3744-402: Is used (in languages that require such declarations) or that the labels on the arms of a case statement are distinct. Many important restrictions of this type, like checking that identifiers are used in the appropriate context (e.g. not adding an integer to a function name), or that subroutine calls have the appropriate number and type of arguments, can be enforced by defining them as rules in

3848-481: Is usually defined using a combination of regular expressions (for lexical structure) and Backus–Naur form (for grammatical structure). Below is a simple grammar, based on Lisp : This grammar specifies the following: The following are examples of well-formed token sequences in this grammar: 12345 , () and (a b c232 (1)) . Not all syntactically correct programs are semantically correct. Many syntactically correct programs are nonetheless ill-formed, per

3952-557: The CPU that performs instructions on data is separate, and data must be piped back and forth to the CPU. The central elements in these languages are variables, assignment , and iteration , which is more efficient than recursion on these machines. Many programming languages have been designed from scratch, altered to meet new needs, and combined with other languages. Many have eventually fallen into disuse. The birth of programming languages in

4056-470: The Canadian government and Facebook as major sponsors. The Global Game Jam , the largest video game development hackathon , often includes optional requirements called 'diversifiers' that aim to promote game accessibility and other causes. VanHacks is an annual hackathon that is part of Vancouver Startup Week. The focus of the hackathon is creating solutions for local non-profit organizations from

4160-628: The United States . Since then, a further three to six events per year have occurred around the world to advance development, generally on university campuses. For Sun Microsystems , the usage referred to an event at the JavaOne conference from June 15 to June 19, 1999; there John Gage challenged attendees to write a program in Java for the new Palm V using the infrared port to communicate with other people who are using Palm and register it on

4264-587: The Vancouver area over the course of 36 hours. VanHacks was created in 2016 by TTT Studios. Various hackathons have been held to improve city transit systems. Hackathons aimed at improvements to city local services are increasing, with one of the London Councils (Hackney) creating a number of successful local solutions with a two-day Hackney-thon. There have also been a number of hackathons devoted to improving education, including Education Hack Day and on

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4368-477: The application programming interface , or API, from a single company or data source. Open Hack, an event run publicly by Yahoo! since 2006 (originally known as "Hack Day", then "Open Hack Day"), has focused on usage of the Yahoo! API, in addition to APIs of websites owned by Yahoo!, like Flickr . The company's Open Hack India event in 2012 had over 700 attendees. Google has run similar events for their APIs, as has

4472-455: The 1950s was stimulated by the desire to make a universal programming language suitable for all machines and uses, avoiding the need to write code for different computers. By the early 1960s, the idea of a universal language was rejected due to the differing requirements of the variety of purposes for which code was written. Desirable qualities of programming languages include readability, writability, and reliability. These features can reduce

4576-573: The Internet. Starting in the mid to late 2000s, hackathons became significantly more widespread and began to be increasingly viewed by companies and venture capitalists as a way to quickly develop new software technologies, and to locate new areas for innovation and funding. Some major companies were born from these hackathons, such as GroupMe , which began as a project at a hackathon at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 conference; in 2011 it

4680-538: The action Players can receive help in games by actions from those not playing The use of inviting new players to a game as game actions Game events are broadcast in a medium where others can perceive them Compound actions that require several players to perform actions Players perform actions to help others under the assumption that they later will be helped in return Trying to influence another placer's actions based upon moral grounds Players can pay real currency to gain some in-game advantage Some actions within

4784-452: The category is nascent, this category is not standardized at all, but some examples include branded in-game goods or even in-game quests. For example, in a game where you run a restaurant, you might be asked to collect ingredients to make a Starbucks Frappuccino, and receive in-game rewards for doing so. As these product placement deals are non-standard, they are largely charged with a production fee, which can be $ 350,000 to $ 750,000 depending on

4888-487: The code is reached; this is called finalization. There is a tradeoff between increased ability to handle exceptions and reduced performance. For example, even though array index errors are common C does not check them for performance reasons. Although programmers can write code to catch user-defined exceptions, this can clutter a program. Standard libraries in some languages, such as C, use their return values to indicate an exception. Some languages and their compilers have

4992-480: The competitive element with a road trip, to connect local tech communities in multiple cities along the bus routes. This is now taking place across North America, Europe, Africa and Australasia. In some hackathons, all work is on a single application, such as an operating system, programming language, or content management system . Such events are often known as "code sprints", and are especially popular for open source software projects, where such events are sometimes

5096-402: The cost of increased storage space and more complexity. Other data types that may be supported include lists , associative (unordered) arrays accessed via keys, records in which data is mapped to names in an ordered structure, and tuples —similar to records but without names for data fields. Pointers store memory addresses, typically referencing locations on the heap where other data

5200-408: The cost of readability. Natural-language programming has been proposed as a way to eliminate the need for a specialized language for programming. However, this goal remains distant and its benefits are open to debate. Edsger W. Dijkstra took the position that the use of a formal language is essential to prevent the introduction of meaningless constructs. Alan Perlis was similarly dismissive of

5304-432: The cost of training programmers in a language, the amount of time needed to write and maintain programs in the language, the cost of compiling the code, and increase runtime performance. Programming language design often involves tradeoffs. For example, features to improve reliability typically come at the cost of performance. Increased expressivity due to a large number of operators makes writing code easier but comes at

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5408-433: The details of the hardware, instead being designed to express algorithms that could be understood more easily by humans. For example, arithmetic expressions could now be written in symbolic notation and later translated into machine code that the hardware could execute. In 1957, Fortran (FORmula TRANslation) was invented. Often considered the first compiled high-level programming language, Fortran has remained in use into

5512-465: The event. Hackathons can last several hours to several days. For hackathons that last 24 hours or longer, especially competitive ones, eating is often informal, with participants often subsisting on food like pizza and energy drinks . Sometimes sleeping is informal as well, with participants sleeping on-site with sleeping bags . At the end of hackathons, there are usually a series of demonstrations in which each group presents their results. To capture

5616-461: The first programming languages. The earliest computers were programmed in first-generation programming languages (1GLs), machine language (simple instructions that could be directly executed by the processor). This code was very difficult to debug and was not portable between different computer systems. In order to improve the ease of programming, assembly languages (or second-generation programming languages —2GLs) were invented, diverging from

5720-584: The form of broadcast industry metadata or video content, while sponsors supply APIs , SDKs and pre-existing open source software code. Hackathons have also been used in the life sciences to advance the informatics infrastructure that supports research. The Open Bioinformatics Foundation ran two hackathons for its member projects in 2002 and 2003, and since 2010 has held 2-day "codefests" preceding its annual conference. The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center has co-organized and sponsored hackathons for evolutionary bioinformatics since 2006. BioHackathon

5824-473: The game itself. This is realized by monetize products that do not technically exist. Virtual goods account for over 90% of all revenue generated by the world's top social game developers. Designers optimize user experience through additional gameplay, missions, and quests, without having to worry about overhead or unused stock. The following are common ways of advertising in social network games: As banner ads within social networks tend to be where ad response

5928-412: The game space that only a single player can manipulate directly Games making use of other players' game instances to provide input to the game state Changing or rearranging game elements to form more complex structures The management of game resources for its own sake Temporary access to other players' private game spaces Actions that have only explicit benefits for somebody else than is performing

6032-451: The game while others may significantly alter the rationale behind the game and require extensive investment from players. The ways of gaining gaming capital are not limited to playing games but the games-related productive activities that are appreciated in the player's social circle too. By accumulating gaming capitals, they provide an intrinsic benefit to gamers as there is an avenue to boost their accomplishment and showcase their expertise of

6136-423: The game, the goals become more challenging and time-consuming. They also provide frequent feedback with their performance. Every action will translate towards a certain goal that will be used to attain higher gaming capitals. Gaming capitals: Players are encouraged to earn different badges, trophies, and accolades that indicate their progress and accomplishments. Some achievements are unlocked just by advancing in

6240-731: The game. The achievements are visible to their network of friends. Gaming capitals are a way for developers to increase replay value provides extended play time, and players get more value from the game. Motivation for collecting gaming capitals: Events timed to real world: Popular games such as Dragon City and Wild Ones require users to wait a certain time period before their "energy bars" replenish. Without energy, they are unable to conduct any form of action. Gamers are forced to wait and return after their energy replenishes to continue playing. Social network games frequently monetize based on virtual good transactions, but other games are emerging that utilize newer economic models. An example of

6344-404: The games moved to mobile as well. While they share many aspects of traditional video games , social network games often employ additional ones that make them distinct. Traditionally they are oriented to be social games and casual games . The first cross-platform "Facebook-to-Mobile" social network game was developed in 2011 by a Finnish company Star Arcade. Social network games are amongst

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6448-405: The great ideas and work-in-progress often people post a video of the demonstrations, blog about results with screenshots and details, share links and progress on social media, suggest a place for open source code and generally make it possible for people to share, learn from and possibly build from the ideas generated and initial work completed. There is sometimes a contest element as well, in which

6552-492: The hackathon ended. Another global study found that only about five percent of all projects developed during hackathons continued for more than five months. Hackathons have been thus associated with the production of short-lived software products often denominated as vaporware . Hackathons have been equally criticized for their failure to contemplate the complexity of issues that they seek to solve, developing technologies that do not address underlying societal and political causes of

6656-439: The idea. Social network game A social network game (sometimes simply referred to as a social media game , social gaming , or online social game ) is a type of online game that is played through social networks or social media . They typically feature gamification systems with multiplayer gameplay mechanics. Social network games were originally implemented as browser games . As mobile gaming took off,

6760-402: The invention of the microprocessor , computers in the 1970s became dramatically cheaper. New computers also allowed more user interaction, which was supported by newer programming languages. Lisp , implemented in 1958, was the first functional programming language. Unlike Fortran, it supported recursion and conditional expressions , and it also introduced dynamic memory management on

6864-429: The language's rules; and may (depending on the language specification and the soundness of the implementation) result in an error on translation or execution. In some cases, such programs may exhibit undefined behavior . Even when a program is well-defined within a language, it may still have a meaning that is not intended by the person who wrote it. Using natural language as an example, it may not be possible to assign

6968-417: The languages intended for execution. He also argues that textual and even graphical input formats that affect the behavior of a computer are programming languages, despite the fact they are commonly not Turing-complete, and remarks that ignorance of programming language concepts is the reason for many flaws in input formats. The first programmable computers were invented at the end of the 1940s, and with them,

7072-605: The largest-ever grand prize at $ 1 million, was accused of impropriety after it emerged that the winning entrants, a two-person startup called Upshot, had been developing the technology that they demoed for over a year and that one of the two was a former Salesforce employee. Major League Hacking expelled a pair of hackers from the September 2015 hackathon Hack the North at the University of Waterloo for making jokes that were interpreted as bomb threats, leading many hackers to criticize

7176-511: The machine language to make programs easier to understand for humans, although they did not increase portability. Initially, hardware resources were scarce and expensive, while human resources were cheaper. Therefore, cumbersome languages that were time-consuming to use, but were closer to the hardware for higher efficiency were favored. The introduction of high-level programming languages ( third-generation programming languages —3GLs)—revolutionized programming. These languages abstracted away

7280-400: The meaning of languages, as opposed to their form ( syntax ). Static semantics defines restrictions on the structure of valid texts that are hard or impossible to express in standard syntactic formalisms. For compiled languages, static semantics essentially include those semantic rules that can be checked at compile time. Examples include checking that every identifier is declared before it

7384-476: The most popular games played in the world, with several products with tens of millions of players. (Lil) Green Patch , Happy Farm , and Mob Wars were some of the first successful games of this genre. FarmVille , Mafia Wars , Kantai Collection , and The Sims Social are more recent examples of popular social network game. Major companies that made or published social network games include Zynga , Wooga and Bigpoint Games . As of 2010, it

7488-639: The new programming languages uses static typing while a few numbers of new languages use dynamic typing like Ring and Julia . Some of the new programming languages are classified as visual programming languages like Scratch , LabVIEW and PWCT . Also, some of these languages mix between textual and visual programming usage like Ballerina . Also, this trend lead to developing projects that help in developing new VPLs like Blockly by Google . Many game engines like Unreal and Unity added support for visual scripting too. Every programming language includes fundamental elements for describing data and

7592-403: The objectives, terms, and details of the hackathon. Developers register to participate in the hackathon and are qualified after the organization screens their background and skills. When the hackathon event begins, the participating individuals or teams start their programming work. The administrator of the hackathon is typically able to answer questions and offer help when their issues come up in

7696-416: The only opportunity for developers to meet face-to-face. Code sprints typically last from one week to three weeks and often take place near conferences at which most of the team attend. Unlike other hackathons, these events rarely include a competitive element. The annual hackathon to work on the operating system OpenBSD, held since 1999, is one such event; it may have originated the word "hackathon". Over

7800-455: The operations or transformations applied to them, such as adding two numbers or selecting an item from a collection. These elements are governed by syntactic and semantic rules that define their structure and meaning, respectively. A programming language's surface form is known as its syntax . Most programming languages are purely textual; they use sequences of text including words, numbers, and punctuation, much like written natural languages. On

7904-436: The option of turning on and off error handling capability, either temporarily or permanently. One of the most important influences on programming language design has been computer architecture . Imperative languages , the most commonly used type, were designed to perform well on von Neumann architecture , the most common computer architecture. In von Neumann architecture, the memory stores both data and instructions, while

8008-436: The order of execution of key instructions via the use of semaphores , controlling access to shared data via monitor , or enabling message passing between threads. Many programming languages include exception handlers, a section of code triggered by runtime errors that can deal with them in two main ways: Some programming languages support dedicating a block of code to run regardless of whether an exception occurs before

8112-511: The organization. As a result of the controversy, Victor Vucicevich resigned from the Hack the North organizing team. Programming language This is an accepted version of this page A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs . Programming languages are described in terms of their syntax (form) and semantics (meaning), usually defined by a formal language . Languages usually provide features such as

8216-483: The other hand, some programming languages are graphical , using visual relationships between symbols to specify a program. The syntax of a language describes the possible combinations of symbols that form a syntactically correct program. The meaning given to a combination of symbols is handled by semantics (either formal or hard-coded in a reference implementation ). Since most languages are textual, this article discusses textual syntax. The programming language syntax

8320-442: The parsing phase. Languages that have constructs that allow the programmer to alter the behavior of the parser make syntax analysis an undecidable problem , and generally blur the distinction between parsing and execution. In contrast to Lisp's macro system and Perl's BEGIN blocks, which may contain general computations, C macros are merely string replacements and do not require code execution. The term semantics refers to

8424-585: The program would trigger an error on the undefined variable p during compilation. However, the program would still be syntactically correct since type declarations provide only semantic information. The grammar needed to specify a programming language can be classified by its position in the Chomsky hierarchy . The syntax of most programming languages can be specified using a Type-2 grammar, i.e., they are context-free grammars . Some languages, including Perl and Lisp, contain constructs that allow execution during

8528-489: The programmer specifies a desired result and allows the interpreter to decide how to achieve it. During the 1980s, the invention of the personal computer transformed the roles for which programming languages were used. New languages introduced in the 1980s included C++, a superset of C that can compile C programs but also supports classes and inheritance . Ada and other new languages introduced support for concurrency . The Japanese government invested heavily into

8632-417: The programmer. Storing an integer in a type that is too small to represent it leads to integer overflow . The most common way of representing negative numbers with signed types is twos complement , although ones complement is also used. Other common types include Boolean —which is either true or false—and character —traditionally one byte , sufficient to represent all ASCII characters. Arrays are

8736-420: The programming language to check for errors. Some languages allow variables of a union type to which any type of value can be assigned, in an exception to their usual static typing rules. In computing, multiple instructions can be executed simultaneously. Many programming languages support instruction-level and subprogram-level concurrency. By the twenty-first century, additional processing power on computers

8840-404: The semantics may define the strategy by which expressions are evaluated to values, or the manner in which control structures conditionally execute statements . The dynamic semantics (also known as execution semantics ) of a language defines how and when the various constructs of a language should produce a program behavior. There are many ways of defining execution semantics. Natural language

8944-686: The so-called fifth-generation languages that added support for concurrency to logic programming constructs, but these languages were outperformed by other concurrency-supporting languages. Due to the rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, new programming languages were introduced to support Web pages and networking . Java , based on C++ and designed for increased portability across systems and security, enjoyed large-scale success because these features are essential for many Internet applications. Another development

9048-553: The social gaming industry. The Walt Disney Company purchased social game developer Playdom for $ 763.0 million, and Electronic Arts purchased PopCap Games for $ 750.0 million in July 2011. Cow Clicker , created by Ian Bogost , was developed to highlight social games' most exploitative and abusive aspects. The game requires users to click on a picture of a cow every 6 hours to earn points. It also prompts users to encourage friends to join in to help them gain more points. Cow Clicker

9152-525: The term "programming language" to Turing complete languages. Most practical programming languages are Turing complete, and as such are equivalent in what programs they can compute. Another usage regards programming languages as theoretical constructs for programming abstract machines and computer languages as the subset thereof that runs on physical computers, which have finite hardware resources. John C. Reynolds emphasizes that formal specification languages are just as much programming languages as are

9256-576: The travel guide company Lonely Planet . The website Foursquare notably held a large, global hackathon in 2011, in which over 500 developers at over 30 sites around the world competed to create applications using the Foursquare API. A second Foursquare hackathon, in 2013, had around 200 developers. The IETF organizes Hackathons for each IETF meetings which are focused on IETF Internet Draft and IETF RFC implementation for better inter-operability and improved Internet Standards. There have been

9360-401: The twenty-first century. Around 1960, the first mainframes —general purpose computers—were developed, although they could only be operated by professionals and the cost was extreme. The data and instructions were input by punch cards , meaning that no input could be added while the program was running. The languages developed at this time therefore are designed for minimal interaction. After

9464-424: The twenty-first century. C allows access to lower-level machine operations more than other contemporary languages. Its power and efficiency, generated in part with flexible pointer operations, comes at the cost of making it more difficult to write correct code. Prolog , designed in 1972, was the first logic programming language, communicating with a computer using formal logic notation. With logic programming,

9568-484: The type of placement and the popularity of the game. Another form of advertising that is prevalent in many social games are lead generation offers. In this form of advertising, companies, usually from different industries, aim to convince players to sign up for their goods or services and in exchange, players will receive virtual gifts or advance in the game as a reward. Applications that are built once, then individualized and licensed again and again. Developer can create

9672-475: The underlying data structure to be changed without the client needing to alter its code. In static typing , all expressions have their types determined before a program executes, typically at compile-time. Most widely used, statically typed programming languages require the types of variables to be specified explicitly. In some languages, types are implicit; one form of this is when the compiler can infer types based on context. The downside of implicit typing

9776-508: The winners, while a controversial 2013 hackathon run by Salesforce.com had a payout of $ 1 million to the winners, billed as the largest-ever prize. Some hackathons focus on a particular platform such as mobile apps , a desktop operating system, web development or video game development . Mobile app hackathons like Over the Air , held at Phoenix Park , Ireland , can see a large amount of corporate sponsorship and interest. Music Hack Day ,

9880-571: The world since 2010. Hackathons have been held to develop applications that run on various mobile device operating systems, such as Android , iOS and MeeGo . Hackathons have also been held to develop video-based applications and computer games. Hackathons where video games are developed are sometimes called game jams . "TV Hackfest" events have been held in both London and San Francisco, focusing mainly on social television and second screen technologies. In TV Hackfests, challenge briefs are typically submitted by content producers and brands, in

9984-462: The years hackathons have come under severe criticism, with multiple observers questioning the adequacy of hackathons to deliver impactful technological solutions. A major part of the reserve towards hackathons has to do with the lack of viability and sustainability of solutions they develop, as clearly shown by recent empirical research. A study examining 11,889 U.S. based events revealed that only seven percent of projects had any activity six months after

10088-476: Was service-oriented programming , designed to exploit distributed systems whose components are connected by a network. Services are similar to objects in object-oriented programming, but run on a separate process. C# and F# cross-pollinated ideas between imperative and functional programming. After 2010, several new languages— Rust , Go , Swift , Zig and Carbon —competed for the performance-critical software for which C had historically been used. Most of

10192-504: Was a mix of programming languages and systems including PHP , Ruby , C++ and go. Where social network video games diverged from traditional game development was the combination of real-time analytics, to continuously optimize game mechanics to drive growth, revenue and engagement. The following table outlines common characteristics of social games, mentioned by Björk at the 2010 GCO Games Convention Online: Information regarding players' game instances are publicly available Game state

10296-425: Was acquired by Skype for $ 85 million. The software PhoneGap began as a project at the iPhoneDevCamp (later renamed iOSDevCamp) in 2008; the company whose engineers developed PhoneGap, Nitobi , refocused itself around PhoneGap, and Nitobi was bought by Adobe in 2011 for an undisclosed amount. Hackathons typically start with communication via a presentation or a web page from the hosting organization that mentions

10400-569: Was founded in 2013 to assist with the running of collegiate hackathons. PennApps at the University of Pennsylvania was the first student-run college hackathon; in 2015 it became the largest college hackathon with its 12th iteration hosting over 2000 people and offering over $ 60k in prizes. The University of Mauritius Computer Club and Cyberstorm.mu organized a Hackathon dubbed "Code Wars" focused on implementing an IETF RFC in Lynx in 2017. ShamHacks at Missouri University of Science and Technology

10504-407: Was increasingly coming from the use of additional processors, which requires programmers to design software that makes use of multiple processors simultaneously to achieve improved performance. Interpreted languages such as Python and Ruby do not support the concurrent use of multiple processors. Other programming languages do support managing data shared between different threads by controlling

10608-550: Was limited, most popular imperative languages—including C , Pascal , Ada , C++ , Java , and C# —are directly or indirectly descended from ALGOL 60. Among its innovations adopted by later programming languages included greater portability and the first use of context-free , BNF grammar. Simula , the first language to support object-oriented programming (including subtypes , dynamic dispatch , and inheritance ), also descends from ALGOL and achieved commercial success. C, another ALGOL descendant, has sustained popularity into

10712-478: Was reported that 55 percent of the social network gaming demographic in the United States consisted of women while in the United Kingdom, women made up nearly 60 percent of the demographic. In addition, most social gamers were around the 30 to 59 age range, with the average social gamer being 43 years old. Social gaming may appeal more to the older demographic because it is free, easier to advance through in

10816-430: Was that of dynamically typed scripting languages — Python , JavaScript , PHP , and Ruby —designed to quickly produce small programs that coordinate existing applications . Due to their integration with HTML , they have also been used for building web pages hosted on servers . During the 2000s, there was a slowdown in the development of new programming languages that achieved widespread popularity. One innovation

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