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Peter Wayner from InfoWorld wrote a story yesterday about the "7 Programming Languages on the Rise". Noting that the "mainstream is broad and deep," he says that most enterprise developers need to know one of the predominant programming languages, which he identifies as Java, C#, or PHP.

But he argues that a number of "niche languages" are beginning to gain in popularity.

As we noted following the Google TV announcement this spring, one of the many interesting things surrounding Google's foray into Internet TV isn't simply its building of the product, but its commitment to building a developer ecosystem around it. And in an attempt to get more people interesting in building Google TV apps, the company announced today that it is giving away 10,000 Google TV devices to "help developers start building for TV."

The Google TV platform is built on the Android OS. Unlike Apple TV, Google TV describes itself as an Internet platform, not a hardware-based system.

Last week, Steve Jobs took the stage and Apple unveiled its new OS, a sleek new MacBook Air, as well as a Mac App Store. But with much less pomp and circumstance, the company also issued an announcement that Java had been "deprecated" on Mac OS X. According to the release notes from the latest update to Java for Mac, "As of the release of Java for Max OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Max OS X, is deprecated."

W3C has announced the third version of its standards for the inclusion of mathematical expressions in Web pages. MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) is aimed to make math on the Web more accessible and more international. While the basic markup remains the same, this version brings to it some improvements for assistive technology, as well as for formulas in languages that are written from right to left.

The MathML standard is supported in a number of applications already, beyond just websites - eBooks, equation editors, screen readers, braille displays, and computational software, for example. And it's part of the larger W3C Open Web Platform, which includes HTML5, CSS and SVG.

Digium has released the latest version of its free and open source VoIP software Asterisk. Asterisk's features includes call waiting, hold and transfer, and caller ID, and this release adds support for Google Voice and Google Talk, as well as numerous other features.

Asterisk boasts over 2 million users and supports a variety of telephony protocols, both analog and VoIP, and both U.S. and European standard signals.

Couchpubtato brings together PubSubHubbub and CouchDB, giving you the ability to turn your feeds into real-time streams and then make any Couch database act as a subscriber endpoint.

Couchpubtato converts incoming XML RSS and ATOM feed data into JSON Activity Streams format. Here's an example:

Following a number of stories over the past week about the release of personally identifiable information, Facebook announced on its developer blog today that it looking into ways to address this.

It can be the bane of a SysAdmin or software engineer's world: those late night notices that a server's crashed, that a key process is suddenly returning critical errors. Even worse, arguably, is a lack of notifications. Then you get in to work on Monday to find that the person on call "didn't get the message" and things have been broken since 5:01 Friday night.

PagerDuty, a Y-Combinator funded startup, offers a service that collects alerts from your various monitoring tools and makes sure the right person is notified if there's a problem.

Goodreads has opened its API that will give parters free access to the book lovers' social network and the book reviews, meta data, and literary discussions.

Developers using the API can pull Goodreads ratings for over 2 million different titles and reviews for over 500,000 titles. Goodreads has more than 4 million members and more than 110 million books cataloged. While other online stores may offer customer book reviews, Goodreads members are (not surprisingly) active with their review contributions.

The API also features Goodreads Connect, a Facebook-Connect like OAuth connection.

There's a substantial amount of buzz and enthusiasm right now about Node.js. So what is it, and why should you care about it (well, other than "I said so")?

ReadWriteWeb chatted with Javascript developer Guillermo Rauch, co-founder and CTO of LearnBoost in order to get some insights.