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LaTeX is a professional document preparation system and document markup language written by Leslie Lamport. It’s a very mature system with development starting more than 30 years ago.

Awk is a versatile programming language designed for pattern scanning and processing language and often used as a data extraction and reporting tool. It’s a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems.

Scheme is a general-purpose, functional, programming language descended from Lisp and Algol. It is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of Lisp.

Rust is a systems programming language that runs fast, prevents segmentation faults, and guarantees thread safety. It accomplishes these goals by being memory safe without using garbage collection. The language enables developers to write programs with the performance and control of a low-level language, but with the powerful abstractions of a high-level language.

Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, multi-paradigm, object-oriented high-level, ALGOL-like programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages. The language was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ada is named after Augusta Ada Byron (often now known as Ada Lovelace), daughter of the poet Lord Byron.

Bash (acronym for the ‘Bourne-Again-SHell’) is the GNU Project’s shell and programming language. It’s an sh-compatible shell that incorporates useful features from the Korn shell (ksh) and C shell (csh). Bash has become a de facto standard for shell scripting. It runs on almost all versions of Unix and a few other operating systems including Windows platforms.

Lisp (derives from "LISt Processing") is one of the oldest programming languages. It was invented in 1958, with the language being conceived by John McCarthy and is based on his paper "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine". Over the years, Lisp has evolved into a family of programming languages. The most commonly used general-purpose dialects are Common Lisp and Scheme. Other dialects include Franz Lisp, Interlisp, Portable Standard Lisp, XLISP and Zetalisp.

Lua is a lightweight, compact, and fast programming language designed as an embeddable scripting language. This cross-platform interpreted language has a simple syntax with powerful data description constructs. Lua aims for simplicity, small size, performance and portability. It has automatic memory management and incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

This is the 25th programming language covered in a series of excellent open source programming books. This article focuses on Forth, an imperative stack-based language.

Erlang is a general-purpose, concurrent, declarative, functional programming language and runtime environment developed by Ericsson, a Swedish multinational provider of communications technology and services. Erlang is dynamically typed and has a pattern matching syntax. The language solves difficult problems inherent in parallel, concurrent environments. It uses sets of parallel supervised processes, not a single sequential process as found in most programming languages.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is used to create web pages and other information that is intended for display in a web browser. Each markup code is known as an element or a tag. The web developer uses these elements to describe and define the content of a webpage. The elements tell the web browser how to display the information (both text and images) to the user.

VimL is a powerful scripting language of the Vim editor. You can use this dynamic, imperative language to design new tools, automate tasks, and redefine existing features of Vim. At an entry level, writing VimL consists of editing the vimrc file. Users can mould Vim to their personal preferences. But the language offers so much more; writing complete plugins that transform the editor. Learning VimL also helps improve your efficiency in every day editing.

The OCaml system is the main implementation of the Caml language. It has a very strong type-checking system, offers a powerful module system, automatic memory management, first-class functions, and adds a full-fledged object-oriented layer. OCaml includes a native-code compiler supporting numerous architectures, for high performance; a bytecode compiler, for increased portability; and an interactive loop, for experimentation and rapid development. OCaml’s integrated object system allows object-oriented programming without sacrificing the benefits of functional programming,

Scala is a modern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based programming and scripting language that’s released under the BSD 3-Clause License.

Haskell is a standardized, general-purpose, polymorphically statically typed, lazy, purely functional language, very different from many programming languages. Recent innovations include static polymorphic typing, higher-order functions, user-definable algebraic data types, a module system, and more. It has built-in concurrency and parallelism, debuggers, profilers, rich libraries and an active community, with approximately 5,400 third-party open source libraries and tools.

Asus has released a new version of their TinkerOS Android distribution for the Asus Tinker Board. It’s still powered by Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow running on a 3.10.0 kernel. But unlike the previous release, Android 13.11.0.4 is not classed as a beta release. The release seems pretty stable.

Pascal is a popular teaching language to introduce structured programming techniques to students. There are many benefits from this type of programming such as code reusability, partitioning code into readable modules and procedures, and help programmers work together on code simultaneously. The language also lends itself to teaching with its easy syntax. Pascal is a strongly typed language, procedural, case insensitive, with extensive error checking. It has built in data types such as arrays, records, files and sets. There are also user defined data types. Pascal supports object oriented programming.

The Asus Tinker Board is a computer designed for Single Board Computer hobbyists, makers [he] Internet of things enthusiasts. One of the highlights of the device is its multimedia support - it’s a tremendous prospect for the multimedia enthusiast on a budget. The computer has a respectable 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A17 quad-core processor. It’s only 32-bit (unlike the Raspberry Pi 3) but it has a higher clock speed. The Tinker Board also sports an integrated ARM-based Mali-T760 graphics processor (GPU). It’s available to purchase from Amazon (and other retailers), and currently priced at $59.99.

My Tinker Board is hooked up to a Benq 24? monitor running with a 1920×1080 resolution. On this monitor, Android’s icons and font are too chunky for me, wasting screen real estate. Asus’s Android image is configured to use 240 DPI. Here’s a very simple way to make better use of the screen real estate by reducing the DPI, making icons and fonts appear smaller. After some experimentation, I’m pretty satisfied with 160 DPI.

Asus has released a new build of Android for the Asus Tinker Board last week. It’s a fairly minor upgrade. It’s still based on Android 6.0.1 with kernel 3.10.0 but sees a number of fixes. However, there is no Google Play Store. This makes installing and upgrading apps tiresome. Fortunately, there’s a solution.