Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 662 posts.
QBE is a compiler backend that aims to provide 70% of the performance of industrial optimizing compilers in 10% of the code. QBE fosters language innovation by offering a compact user-friendly and performant backend. The size limit constrains QBE to focus on the essential and prevents embarking on a never-ending path…
While working on an article for the Monad.Reader, I’ve had the opportunity to think about how people learn and gain intuition for abstraction, and the implications for pedagogy. The heart of …
Generic data structures (vectors, queues, maps, trees, and so on) seem to be the hot topic if you are evaluating a new language. One of the most frequent questions we've had about Go is where the generics are. It seems like there are three basic approaches to generics:
Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. The language is named after Piet Mondrian , who pioneered the field of geometric abstract art. I would have liked to call the language Mondrian, but someone beat me to it with a rather mundane-looking scripting language. Oh well, we can't…
Inspirations & experiments, mainly about denotative/functional programming in Haskell
Aditya Bhargava's personal blog.
These are questions that people ask me often. If you have better questions or comments on the answers, feel free to email me. Please remember that I can't spend all of my time improving my homepages.
(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp � both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of…
Introduction to modern Prolog
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…
The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone. Our work flows from a vision that includes a creative individual and the best computing hardware available. We have chosen to concentrate on two principle areas of research: a language of description (programming…
(This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp .) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as…
Ever wondered how Clojure's persistent vector actually works? This is part 1 of a blog series which aims to explain them.
While reviewing some of the comments on my post about parallelism and concurrency, I noticed that the great fallacy about dynamic and static languages continues to hold people in its thrall. So, i…
Go is defined to be a safe language. Indices into array or string references must be in bounds; there is no way to reinterpret the bits of one type as another, no way to conjure a pointer out of thin air; and there is no way to release memory, so no chance of “ dangling pointer ” errors and the associated memory…
They’re not burritos.
I'm developing a programming language called Kernel. Kernel is a conservative, Scheme-like dialect of Lisp in which everything is a first-class object.
A recipe for a functional app, part 2
An introduction to Zig's curious concurrent programming API.
I've gotten a bunch of emails asking for advice on how to learn Common Lisp in the present day. I decided to write down all the advice I've been giving through email and social media posts in the hopes that someone might find it useful.
In an article recently linked from reddit entitled Tour de Babel you can read (among lots of other nonsense): Heck, people still use Tcl as an embedded interpreter, even though Python is far superior to Tcl in every conceivable way -- except, that is, for the frost thing.
Here's a language that gives near-C performance that feels like Python or Ruby with optional type annotations (that you can feed to one of two static analysis tools ) that has good support for macros plus decent-ish support for FP, plus a lot more. What's not to like? I'm mostly not going to talk about how great Julia…
The tokens #t and #f are the True and False literals, respectively. The single quote mark serves to quote the following expression. The syntax ' exp is completely equivalent to (quote exp ) . The backquote character ` is called quasiquote in Scheme; it is similar to ' except that within a quasiquoted expression, the…
