Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 662 posts.
In India, Panini creates an exact description of the Sanskrit language, including pronunciation. Sanskrit can be completely reconstructed using nothing but Panini's grammar. Panini's grammar, which predates Euclid, is probably the first formal system of any kind. In the future, nothing like it will exist for any other…
Many functional programming articles teach abstract functional techniques. That is, composition, pipelining, higher order functions. This one is different. I...
Try to spot who liked hacking away at corpses rather than computers
Collected quotes and snippets from people publicly sneezing off or belittling what curl is, explaining how easy it would be to make a replacement in no time with no effort or generally not being very helpful. These are statements made seriously. For all I know, they were not ironic. If you find others to add ……
My current thoughts on the state of Python 3 and where it’s heading.
I’ve recently come back to an older project of mine (that powers this website), and as I did some maintenance work: upgrade to newer crates, upgrade to a newer rustc, I noticed that my build was ta...
Beautiful Racket
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
This post will be a bit all over the place. Several months ago, I wrote Hard Mode Rust, exploring an allocation-conscious style of programming. In the ensuing discussion, @jamii name-dropped TigerBeetle, a reliable, distributed, fast, and small database written in Zig in a similar style, and, well, I now find myself…
turtle 1.0 announcement post
I was asked by someone to put this old piece of writing of mine somewhere more permanent, so here it is. A few comments off the top: This isn’t new. I wrote it years ago. Yes, I’m a b…
A strong runner up was this quote, which captures the essence of what we should be trying to do when creating new languages:
I've been floating ways to simplify the memory management story in Rust around the core team lately. Memory management is a contentious topic, since we've worked hard to get to the current state of things, and with the push toward stability lately, there is a (quite reasonable!) resistance to any changes at this…
Ok, I lied, there’s no weird trick. However, you can easily reduce a Go binary size by more than 6 times with some flags and common tools.
See also Dennis Ritchie on aliasing, PLOS article , pointer alias in C and remarks on the purpose of C.
The German school of Lisp is described by Kazimir Majorinc as a Spartan movement 1 in Lisp implementation. But let me be clear, the Lisps in question are not toys like the one’s littering the Lisp landscape (including my own ). Likewise, these Lisps are not libraries nor are they full-blown development ecosystems.
The goal of Project Valhalla is to bring more flexible flattened data types to JVM-based languages, to bring the programming model back in line with the performance characteristics of modern hardware. The core feature is inline classes (known previously as value types ), but such a fundamental perturbation of the JVM…
One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem…
An obscure research project could radically accelerate innovation in programming language design
Have you ever been in the situation where you need to quickly understand what a piece of code in some unfamiliar language does? If the language looks a lot like what you’re comfortable with, you can usually guess what large amounts of the code does; even if you may not be completely familiar how all the language…
I’ve been pondering this subject for a while, and I think I’m finally ready to write about it. Tcl was, for many years, my go-to language of choice. It’s still near and dear to me…
There are still some rough edges here, and also a fair amount of content to be added. But if we waited until everything was polished before publishing, it would probably never happen. So feel free to make comments, suggestions, or contribute new content. As always, pull requests are the most desirable.
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
What a query-based compiler is and what they are good for.
I’ve been thinking about garbage collection in Rust for a long time, ever since I started working on Servo’s JS layer. I’ve designed a GC library, …
This pattern is pretty common if you are interacting with Operating System APIs . Another example .
