Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 662 posts.
The following table shows diagrams of identity, the booleans, some standard combinators, some Church numerals, the predecessor function on Church numerals, and Omega. term definition diagram alternative I/1 λx.x K/true λx.λy.x false/0 λx.λy.y S λx.λy.λz.(x z)(y z) Y λf.(λx.x x)(λx.f(x x)) 2 λf.λx.f(f x) 3 λf.λx.f(f(f…
Almost five months ago, I wrote a blog post about my new programming language, Hackett , a fanciful sketch of a programming language from a far-off land with Haskell’s type system and Racket’s macros. At that point in time, I had a little prototype that barely worked, that I barely understood, and was a little bit of…
Zed Shaw, of Learn Python the Hard Way fame, has now written The Case Against Python 3. I’m not involved with core Python development. The only skin I have in this game is that I like Python 3. It’s a good language. And one of the big factors I’ve seen slowing its adoption is that respected people in the Python commu
My first adventures in parsing theory came when I was doing anindependent study of programming languages in college. When I got tothe part about algorithms s...
I’ve been working on an experimental new C++ language feature tentatively called “metaclasses” that aims to make C++ programming both more powerful and simpler. You can find out about it here: Curr…
Or: The Most Expensive Linked List I’ve Ever Written
This post is for all of the miscellaneous features that arent large enough to get their own individual posts. If you havent read all of them, here are the links to the previous posts on recompilation , inspection , class … Read the rest
Let's take a quick look at what compile-time execution looks like in Zig.
The chart classifies programming paradigms according to their kernel languages. Kernel languages are ordered according to the creative extension principle: a new concept is added when it cannot be encoded with only local transformations. Two languages that implement the same paradigm can nevertheless have very…
Technical articles by Kevin Menard. Topics include Ruby, Java, machine learning, and general computing.
Lil is part of the technology that powers Decker , a multimedia creative tool inspired by HyperCard . Decker uses Lil for adding custom behavior to decks and the widgets within. Lil is designed to be learned in layers, but it is a richly multi-paradigm language which incorporates ideas from imperative, functional…
I often write pieces that showcase how well Rust can work for you, and how it can let you build powerful abstractions, and prevents you from making a bunch of mistakes. If you read something like S...
Source code can be found at: https://github.com/dyoo/brainfudge . The latest version of this document lives in http://hashcollision.org/brainfudge .
Signed integers are not allowed to overflow in C and C++, and this helps compilers generate better code. I was interested in how GCC is tak...
Don't get me wrong - I've written tons of Java over the last decade or so & think its been a great evolutionary step from C++ and Smalltalk ...
I’ve spent the last year building keyboards , which has included writing firmware for a variety custom circuit boards.
Two years ago, I had a blog entry describing falling in love with Rust . Of course, a relationship with a technology is like any other relationship: as novelty and infatuation wears off, it can get on a longer term (and often more realistic and subdued) footing – or it can begin to fray. So well one might ask: how is…
Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets ! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany.
Beautiful Racket
No matter what language you program in or what applications you use: everything you do with a computer today is powered at some level by a piece of C/C++ code.
How do you design good abstractions? By using abstractions that already exist.
I was hoping you would mention the dynamic checkers, ASAN etc. My fear is people will start using these but not understand how to really use them properly. Since they’re dynamic checkers you really need a good testing harness and test cases to go with it. The bugs ASAN/TSAN etc catch are usually strange boundary…
A mega-rant about all the things I find bad about Julia.
