Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 39 posts.
This talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes every other week, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git.
(This article has been translated into Spanish (PDF, with some additions) by Jorge Amado Soria Ramirez — thanks!) Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us
An article about Lisp programming language.
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...
Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? Did you ever get an email from your friends in…
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:
I hate Booleans! But isn’t everything “just bits”? Aren’t computers built from gates? And aren’t gates just the logical connectives? How can a Computer Scientist p…
I occasionally get asked about whether, or how well, Visual C++ supports C99. This week, I just posted two replies to this questions on UserVoice (merged below). Last fall, I also answered it in an…
How to implement type classes in terms of term-level data structures
A tour of free monads and their motivating use cases
Introduction There doesn’t seem to be a good tutorial out there for concatenative programming, so I figured I’d write one, inspired by t...
Most of the comments in this semicolons in JS exchange make me sad. The code in question:
What does the following code do? If you answered
Lately I've had an urge to start playing a few games again, namely Nethack and Dwarf Fortress (the latter being triggered by this book ). Aside from being incredibly fun, they also made me want to play around with writing a roguelike game of my own.
After the last post about high performance, high level programming, Slava Pestov, of Factor fame, wondered whether it was generally true that “if you want good performance you have to write C…
An article describing the experience of writing a Lisp interpreter in Haskell.
You may have heard last week how Innokenty Mihailov’s great Enumerable::Lazy feature was accepted into the Ruby 2.0 code base. But you may not have heard about an even more significant change that was merged into Ruby 2.0 in January: a new algorithm for garbage collection called “Bitmap Marking.” The developer behind…
This article is an attempt to better understand how the front-end of Python works. Just reading documentation and source code may be a bit boring, so I'm taking a hands-on approach here: I'm going to add an until statement to Python.
Does the standard say whether or not “char” is “unsigned char” or “signed char”? (I guess not from what you wrote above.)
While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby's blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript's "first class functions". Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both…
Due to the recent php2shell vulnerability , to save time and effort for both users and maintainers alike, and out of an overabundance of caution, all Scripts sites have had PHP (php-cgi) disabled until a patch is available and backported.
I ran into a really fun bug at work yesterday, where I discovered that my C program was branching down logically inconsistent code paths. After drinking another cup of coffee and firing up GDB I realized that somehow, a boolean variable in my code was simultaneously testing as both true and not true.
I know, I know, the world does not need yet another introduction to monads (or yet another article complaining that world does not need yet another introduction to monads). So you’ll be glad to know this isn’t one of those, in the sense that it’s not new. I thought I’d write it because, first, monads are worth knowing…
I’ve used CoffeeScript for a few months now. Coming from Python, I felt that CoffeeScript was more concise than Javascript, so I decided to use it for a few small projects. Initially, it was a nice experience, but then I gradually realized that, while writing CoffeeScript code was very pleasant, reading it wasn’t so…
