Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 39 posts.
April 2001, rev. April 2003 (This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb . Our plan was to write software that would let end users build online stores. What was novel about this software, at the…
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...
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
In an article recently linked from reddit entitled Tour de Babel you can read (among lots of other nonsense): Heck, people still use Tcl as an embedded interpreter, even though Python is far superior to Tcl in every conceivable way -- except, that is, for the frost thing.
I keep seeing discussions that equate zig's level of memory safety with c (or occasionally with rust!). Neither is particularly accurate. This is an attempt at a more detailed breakdown.
It happened. Nearly 5 years of paper writing, being snuck Committee Meeting notes on the DL until I could access them myself and absolve my co-conspirators of their sins, 5 different implementations/patches later, I can
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?
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?
Phantomderp and I have both recently been very aligned on a particular subject: being extremely angry about C ABIs and trying to fix them . Where we’re not aligned is why we’re mad about them.
Introducing a new programming language.
Binary lambda calculus ( BLC ) is a minimal, pure functional programming language invented by John Tromp in 2004, 1 based on a binary encoding of the untyped lambda calculus in De Bruijn index notation.
I've debated with myself for several years about whether or not to write this down. After so much time has passed, the facts are confused, 20/20 hindsight creeps in, and selective memory plays a role in how fairly I can portray the events. Many reporters have asked me my version of these past few years, several have…
In which ChatGPT and I invent a fictional language spoken by slime-people
This is a short overview of the development that's gone into "Kandria"(https://kandria.com), the open world action RPG I've been working on in recent years.
Lil is part of the technology that powers Decker , a multimedia creative tool inspired by HyperCard . Decker uses Lil for adding custom behavior to decks and the widgets within. Lil is designed to be learned in layers, but it is a richly multi-paradigm language which incorporates ideas from imperative, functional…
I often write pieces that showcase how well Rust can work for you, and how it can let you build powerful abstractions, and prevents you from making a bunch of mistakes. If you read something like S...
A strong runner up was this quote, which captures the essence of what we should be trying to do when creating new languages:
The German school of Lisp is described by Kazimir Majorinc as a Spartan movement 1 in Lisp implementation. But let me be clear, the Lisps in question are not toys like the one’s littering the Lisp landscape (including my own ). Likewise, these Lisps are not libraries nor are they full-blown development ecosystems.
Why unsafe Rust is a complex and user unfriendly experience.
In the two years since I’ve posted I want off Mr Golang’s Wild Ride, it’s made the rounds time and time again, on Reddit, on Lobste.rs, on HackerNews, and elsewhere. And every time, it elicits the ...
You might remember my old post about the journey to get at least a bit of Rust code working for Windows 98 SE . Well, I'm back, this time with a more ambitious package:
When you use Rust, it is sometimes outright preposterous how much knowledge of language, and how much of programming ingenuity and curiosity you need in order to accomplish the most trivial things. When you feel particularly desperate, you go to rust/issues and search for a solution for your problem. Suddenly, you…
Why self-host Zig?<br> For great justice, of course… and also a few more reasons actually.
Rust is awesome, for certain things. But think twice before picking it up for a startup that needs to move fast.
We’ll spend the rest of this book illuminating every dark and sundry corner of the Lox language, but it seems cruel to have you immediately start grinding out code for the interpreter without at least a glimpse of what we’re going to end up with.
People in the programming language design community strive to make their languages more expressive, with a strong type system, mainly to increase ergonomics by avoiding code duplication in final software; however, the more expressive their languages become, the more abruptly duplication penetrates the language itself.
Introducing Ezno and the current state of the project.
