Google announced the first stable release of its new programming language -- dubbed "Go" -- on Wednesday, providing an initial base of support for new projects and applications. Binaries have been released for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OS X.

In his annual "State of the Onion" speech at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), Perl creator Larry Wall hinted that the long-awaited version 6 of the Perl programming language might finally be released soon. He also ruminated about the effect that Perl 6 would have, once it is released.

Less than four months after its unveiling at an early, experimental stage, Google Go looks promising to developers who say it offers significant improvements over other programming languages.

The new version of the Groovy programming language aims to make life easier for programmers who work with Java and SQL, the language's developers note.

Microsoft has done more to popularize graphical programming than any other vendor. The company's development tools, led by Visual Basic and Visual Studio, have been used by millions of software developers over the past two decades.

Microsoft is extending its "Community Promise" patent licensing to C# programs and Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), enabling open source usage of the technologies without fear of any reprisals.