Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 45 posts.
This is the story of the rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab as told from my personal (and highly biased) point of view. I am not writing in my official capacity as an employee of JPL, nor am I in any way representing the official position of JPL. (This will become rather obvious shortly.)
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
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.
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…
An introduction to Zig's curious concurrent programming API.
Why I can't use Elm, and can't recommend it to others.
Lisp has done quite well over the last ten years: becoming nearly standardized, forming the basis of a commercial sector, achieving excellent performance, having good environments, able to deliver applications. Yet the Lisp community has failed to do as well as it could have. In this paper I look at the successes, the…
Internet debates about typing disciplines continue to be plagued by a pervasive myth that dynamic type systems are inherently better at modeling “open world” domains. The argument usually goes like this: the goal of static typing is to pin everything down as much as possible, but in the real world, that just isn’t…
Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about how there’s more to a pointer than meets the eye. One key point I was trying to make is that just because two pointers point to the same address...
Project Loom aims to drastically reduce the effort of writing, maintaining, and observing high-throughput concurrent applications that make the best use of available hardware.
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.
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…
So the other day I both defined Tcl procedures all by myself and used them interactively, and I liked it, to the point where it felt like some kind of local optimum. This entry is an attempt to cope with the trauma of liking Tcl, by means of rationalizing it. I'll first tell the story of my fascinating adventures, and…
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over. This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing tho...
PHP 8.0 brings features like attributes, union types, and the JIT compiler. It has some important breaking changes, and improved performance.
Both QBE and LLVM are compiler backends using an SSA representation. This document will explain why LLVM does not make QBE a redundant project. Obviously, everything following is biased, because written by me.
While not yet at version 1.0, Zig is about to reach a new level of maturity and stability.
Haskell programmers spend a lot of time talking about type safety . The Haskell school of program construction advocates “capturing invariants in the type system” and “making illegal states unrepresentable,” both of which sound like compelling goals, but are rather vague on the techniques used to achieve them. Almost…
The following table shows diagrams of identity, the booleans, some standard combinators, some Church numerals, the predecessor function on Church numerals, and Omega. term definition diagram alternative I/1 λx.x K/true λx.λy.x false/0 λx.λy.y S λx.λy.λz.(x z)(y z) Y λf.(λx.x x)(λx.f(x x)) 2 λf.λx.f(f x) 3 λf.λx.f(f(f…
The chart classifies programming paradigms according to their kernel languages. Kernel languages are ordered according to the creative extension principle: a new concept is added when it cannot be encoded with only local transformations. Two languages that implement the same paradigm can nevertheless have very…
Two years ago, I had a blog entry describing falling in love with Rust . Of course, a relationship with a technology is like any other relationship: as novelty and infatuation wears off, it can get on a longer term (and often more realistic and subdued) footing – or it can begin to fray. So well one might ask: how is…
Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets ! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany.
What a query-based compiler is and what they are good for.
I've been using zig for ~4 months worth of side projects, including a toy text editor and an interpreter for a relational language . I've written ~10kloc.
A recent tweet by a friend of mine noted how the public interest in the Scala programming language seems to have plateaued or waned, which matches my feeling of the latest trends and zeitgeist. This blog post will go into why I think that has happened, where Scala stands now, and what the future holds for the Scala…
