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Origins of Python's “Functional” Features (2009)
I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familia...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 662 posts.
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Value Types for Java – A sketch of proposed enhancements
This is a sketch of proposed enhancements to the Java Virtual Machine instruction set, and secondarily to the Java Language, to support small immutable, identityless value types . (They may also be considered as identityless aggregates, user-defined primitives, immutable records, or restricted classes.) This is an…
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Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations for the Java Virtual Machine
Project Loom's mission is to make it easier to write, debug, profile and maintain concurrent applications meeting today's requirements. Threads, provided by Java from its first day, are a natural and convenient concurrency construct (putting aside the separate question of communication among threads) which is being…
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Parsing C++ is literally undecidable (2013)
Many programmers are aware that C++ templates are Turing-complete, andthis was proved in the 2003 paper C++ Templates areTuring Complete.
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The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, from Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by _why the lucky stiff. CC BY-SA 2.5.
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Introduction
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
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Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”
It took three years and 200,000 words more than I expected, but my second book, Crafting Interpreters , is complete. I finished the third draft of the last chapter today, marking the last of around 1,400 days of continuous writing.
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If PHP Were British (2011)
PHP, as the result of a spectacular error of judgement, appears to be written in US English. How do we developers ensure the traditions of the British Empire continue to be upheld, even in the digital age?
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V Language Review
V is a programming language promising to be “Simple, fast, safe, compiled. For developing maintainable software.” V has a controversial past but what is the state of V in 2022?
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Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)
In 2001, Edsger W. Dijkstra wrote a letter to the Budget Council of The University of Texas. A PDF is available here , I’ve typed it up so that everyone can read it. Sadly, the curriculum was changed to Java . Relatedly, the algorithmic language Scheme was replaced by Python in MIT’s The Structure and Interpretation…
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Myths about Integer Overflow in Rust
Integer overflow detection/handling in Rust is sometimes misunderstood.
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Lisp as an alternative to Java (2000)
It turns out my hopes were answered. First, Prechelt published another article that covers Tcl, Python, Perl, and Rexx. Also, Ron Garret (nee Erann Gat) did a follow-up study in which he asked programmers to write Prechelt's test program in Lisp. His results show that the resulting Lisp programs ran faster on average…
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Chicken Scheme internals: the garbage collector
Hi, I'm Peter Bex, a Scheme and free software enthusiast from the Netherlands. See my user page on the CHICKEN wiki or my git server for some of my projects.
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How do I deal with memory leaks? (2022)
These are questions about C++ Style and Technique that people ask me often. If you have better questions or comments on the answers, feel free to email me (bs at cs dot tamu dot edu). Please remember that I can't spend all of my time improving my homepages.
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Don't Learn C the Wrong Way
Update : On Sep. 28, 2015, Zed Shaw wrote a rebuttal to this post. You can find the details here .
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Condition Handling in the Lisp Language Family (2001)
This paper appears in Advances in Exception Handling Techniques , edited by A. Romanovsky, C. Dony, J.L. Knudsen, and A. Tripathi. This book, published in 2001, is part of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2022 , published by Springer .
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Revisiting a 'smaller Rust'
A bit over a year ago, I wrote some notes on a “smaller Rust” - a higher level language that would take inspiration from some of Rust’s type system innovations, but would be simpler by virtue of targeting a domain with less stringent requirements for user control and performance. During my time of unemployment this…
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Functional options for friendly APIs
What follows is the text of my presentation, Functional options for friendly APIs that I gave at dotGo this year. It has been edited slightly for readability.
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How to C in 2016
This is a draft I wrote in early 2015 and never got around to publishing. Here’s the mostly unpolished version because it wasn’t doing anybody any good sitting in my drafts folder. The simplest change was updating year 2015 to 2016 at publication time.
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On Repl-Driven Programming
Once upon a time, someone with the handle “entha_saava” posted this question on Hacker News :
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Why Python Is Slow: Looking Under the Hood
When I teach courses on Python for scientific computing, I make this point very early in the course, and tell the students why: it boils down to Python being a dynamically typed, interpreted language, where values are stored not in dense buffers but in scattered objects. And then I talk about how to get around this by…