Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 38 posts.
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…
Encoding business logic in types
I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familia...
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…
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Update: This post got a sequel, Breaking our latin-1 assumptions. I’ve seen misconceptions about Unicode crop up regularly in posts discussing it. …
To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript Gao et al., ICSE 2017 This is a terrific piece of work with immediate practical applications for many project teams. Is it worth th…
My twitter feed has recently been filled with discussions about the following program #include <cstdlib> typedef int (*Function)(); s...
Since you talk about the sanitizers and tools like Checked-C, I’ll note there’s also SaferCPlusPlus[1], which is essentially a memory-safe (and data race safe) subset of C++. The idea is that there are a finite number of C++ elements that contribute to memory unsafety, and since the advent of C++11, it is now…
There are many descriptions floating around the internet, trying to explain functional programming in simple terms. Unfortunately, most discuss details only loosely related to functional programming, while others focus on topics that are completely irrelevant. So of course, I had to write my own!
Disclaimer: Most patterns are easy to implement because we use dynamic typing, functional programming and, of course, Clojure. Some of them look wrong and ugly. It’s okay. All characters are fake, coincidences are accidental.
(N.B. The word “fuck” appears multiple times in this post. I recommend that the reader temporarily not consider “fuck” as profanity, as it isn’t used that way here.)
Almost five months ago, I wrote a blog post about my new programming language, Hackett , a fanciful sketch of a programming language from a far-off land with Haskell’s type system and Racket’s macros. At that point in time, I had a little prototype that barely worked, that I barely understood, and was a little bit of…
I’ve been working on an experimental new C++ language feature tentatively called “metaclasses” that aims to make C++ programming both more powerful and simpler. You can find out about it here: Curr…
Technical articles by Kevin Menard. Topics include Ruby, Java, machine learning, and general computing.
An obscure research project could radically accelerate innovation in programming language design
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…
Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
This post takes a short break from ASDL to expand on one of my Hacker News comments.
I myself was not on the famous C3 (Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System) project in 1996-2000 that is pivotal to ‘Extreme Programming’ (XP). That project used Smalltalk, and team contribution was provided by Object Technology International’s ENVY version control system. I wanted to know more about that so I…
Zig places importance on the concept of whether an expression is known at compile-time. There are a few different places this concept is used, and these building blocks are used to keep the language small, readable, and powerful.
According to the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual ISBN 0 262 13011 4, `A' and `D' stand for `address' and `decrement', as on page 36 it says:
For some reason, this post got picked up again and is debated today in 2021, almost 4 years since I wrote it. Some things have changed in the mean time and I might've phrased a few things differently if I had written this today. But still, what's here below is what I wrote back then. … Continue reading curl is C →
In a previous article I demonstrated video filtering with C and a unix pipeline . Thanks to the ubiquitous support for the ridiculously simple Netpbm formats — specifically the “Portable PixMap” ( .ppm , P6 ) binary format — it’s trivial to parse and produce image data in any language without image libraries. Video…
I've also ended up using Emacs along side Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm & Webstorm). It is an odd combo but it works great. Emacs for mind-control level text editing, and the IDE works great for mouse-oriented poking around and small edits.
