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TIOBE Software has released its programming community index for December 2011, and the numbers show that C# is gaining in popularity.

According to TIOBE, the most popular languages right now are Java, C, C++, C# and Objective-C. (In that order.) There's no movement at all in the top 3, though TIOBE says that C++ has lost a bit of popularity since December 2010. C# moved up from 5th place to 4th, and is just a hair behind C++.

Red Hat's PaaS, OpenShift, is getting an upgrade that will make Java developers happy. Starting today, OpenShift is adding in "Build-as-a-Service" to its features for Java. Developers write code wherever they like, then build software in OpenShift.

Using JBoss Tools or another IDE, developers can push their Java code up to OpenShift, and then the rest is going to be done "in the cloud."

The inherent problem with procedural programming languages is that they're not designed for parallel processing. A common language's typical approach to multithreading is to bolt on an asynchronous library, and have developers use it to write individual callback functions that may run concurrently and signal back when they're done. You might have a few asynchronous functions going at once, but you're still invoking them in sequence.

A language that embraced asynchronicity and parallelism at its core would have to adopt a very different mindset. But what if a language adopted a broader syntax that incorporated the older, synchronous procedural model word-for-word, but enabled the developer to transition to asynchronicity at her own pace... and for Android developers, produced the same bytecode that Android's Dalvik interpreter expects? Would you believe one Java engineer already had the answer back in 2003?

Jelastic.com, the Java PaaS similar to Heroku, has compiled an interesting market share analysis of their more than 1,000 developers. Since their service is built on standard application servers and databases, their developers can choose which of four major open source databases they want to use: MySQL, Postgres, MariaDB and MongoDB. Granted, this is just one company's view of things, but given that the numbers are still interesting, and there are some differences between the choices by North American and European developers.

In August, Twitter acquired BackType, a social media analytics company. One of the things that Twitter picked up in that acquisition was Storm, the "Hadoop of realtime processing.

At the time, Twitter said that it would open source Storm in September at the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis. Guess what? They did. As of this week, Storm is on GitHub under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

The second round of talks between chief executives from Google and Oracle commences today, with the possibility of a settlement between the two over Google's use of Java in Android, as Bloomberg reports this morning. This just days after the latest rebuke of Google by Judge William Alsup, who last Thursday granted only a small part of Google's motion to throw out aspects of Oracle's copyright infringement claims.

Oracle claims, among other things, that when Google copied the precise order and phraseology of Java methods in developing its Dalvik virtual machine for Android, it violated copyright. The judge disagreed. Google claims that such order is necessary in order to educate developers on how APIs work, and since an API is an implementation of software that the Supreme Court ruled falls outside the boundaries of intellectual property, that the API specifications also fall outside those boundaries. The judge disagreed with that too.

Two conferences being held next month, one in Aarhus, Denmark on October 10 and another two weeks later in Portland, Oregon, are scheduled to feature Lars Bak, the designer of the V8 interpreter used in Google Chrome. In Aarhus, Bak will be joined by Gilad Bracha, a Google engineer and co-author of the original Java Language Specification and the creator of the Newspeak programming language, a derivative of Smalltalk.

The subject of their talks may have inadvertently been revealed by the GOTO Aarhus conference organizers: It's a programming language being conceived at Google tentatively called Dart (maybe bearing no relation to the DART advertising platform run by Google subsidiary DoubleClick).

In a legal filing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco this morning, a copy of which was obtained from Oracle by RWW, attorneys for Oracle Corp. tell the judge in the ongoing infringement lawsuit against Google that it's willing to reopen negotiations for a settlement. Minutes ago, Google responded to that notice by telling the court it's willing to make executives available for settlement talks.

These events after documents filed yesterday in the case, and first uncovered by journalist Florian Mueller, reveal internal Google strategy briefings where it was suggested that Android should be developed on a course that appears to be open source, but actually is not. Instead, the documents from mid-2009 suggest, preferential treatment should be given specifically to Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless for being the first to develop Android phones to Google specifications.

Red Hat announced today that it's beefing up the OpenShift platform it unveiled in March. The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) play from Red Hat now supports Java Enterprise Edition 6 (EE6) via JBoss Application Server 7 (AS7) and MemBase in OpenShift Flex.

Earlier this month the Java 7 release candidate came out, and the official version was released earlier this week. Now that it's out, and apart from some serious bugs, what do you think about it?