Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 17 posts.
Why does this matter? As Steve Yegge said , "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work." Yegge describes 8 problems that can be solved with compilers (or equally well with interpreters, or with Yegge's typical heavy dosage of cynicism).
My VLSI tools take a chip from conception through testing. Perhaps 500 lines of source code. Cadence, Mentor Graphics do the same, more or less. With how much source/object code?
Writing and Stuff from Isaac Z. Schlueter
The draft of " Yacc is Dead " that David Darais and I posted on arXiv received some attention, so we'd like to share updates and feedback.
Oh, Steve, you do make me laugh, always. And it's so long between posts these days I hardly believed it when Safari hinted that there was some action over at Steve's. Thank you.
(You probably already have realized this.) The reason the compiler produced code that terminated was based upon the fact that the values being altered (i.e., a, b and c) within the “while” loop are never referenced again after the loop. But, once you added code which printed the resulting values it was forced to…
I’ve been doing a lot of work, lately, with JavaScript inheritance – namely for my work-in-progress JavaScript book – and in doing so have examined a number of different JavaScript classical-inheritance-simulating techniques. Out of all the ones that I’ve looked at I think my favorites were the implementations…
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
There are a thousand programming languages out there (Literally, it seems, according to people who actually count such things.) A classification of so many species is bound to be complex and subjec…
First Shugo announced them at RubyKaigi. Then Matz showed some improved syntax at RubyConf. But what are refinements [http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4085] all about, and what would they be used for? The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby
For a while now, the Ruby community has become enamored in the latest new hotness, evented programming and Node.js. It's gone so far that I've heard a number of prominent Rubyists saying that JavaScript and Node.js are the only sane way to handle a number of
Back in 1996, having heard horror stories about Herbert Schildt's C: The Complete Reference , I decided to check it out. I flipped the book open; I found glaring errors. I paged through it. I found more glaring errors. In short, the book had lived up to the hype; it was awful. Being a pedantic sort, and having just…
Today marks the end of a crazy six year journey for me at Microsoft. I clearly remember my brutal first 8 months at this company as I worked with lawyers, marketing folks and execs to figure out if and how we could release IronPython as an open source project from Microsoft. The final approval for that release came…
A question is infrequently answered either because few people know the answer or because it concerns an obscure, subtle point (but a point that may be crucial to you). I thought I had invented the term for my Java IAQ , but it also shows up at the very informative About.com Urban Legends site. There are lots of Python…
Recently I had to go through some code that uses the uIP TCP/IP stack, which reminded me, it has been a long time since I did something in C so I ended up spending the weekend implementing the 10 rules John McCarthy described in his paper A Micro-Manual for Lisp - not the whole Truth .
Though Frank Sinatra says it best , “I’m leaving today” isn’t exactly accurate; my last day as a Microsoft employee was July 23rd, 2010. This post is almost two weeks delayed as Felicia and I have been on the road since the 26th, driving cross-country to the east coast; we also decided to leave Seattle in favor of New…
