Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 38 posts.
I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase the right thing . To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:
Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. The language is named after Piet Mondrian , who pioneered the field of geometric abstract art. I would have liked to call the language Mondrian, but someone beat me to it with a rather mundane-looking scripting language. Oh well, we can't…
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it. Heaps were one, just about the only thing I got out of my truncated CS education. I recently stumbled onto another: Pratt or…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
People complain about Rust syntax. I think that most of the time when people think they have an issue with Rust's syntax, they actually object to Rust's semantics. In this slightly whimsical post, I'll try to disentangle the two.
No general procedure for bug checks will do. Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you. I will prove that although you might work till you drop, you cannot tell if computation will stop. For imagine we have a procedure called P that for specified input permits you to see whether specified source code, with…
How a 10 year old design choice for Swift’s type checker still haunts us to this day
OK, so C# doesn’t share the Rust concept of “borrowing,” so it wouldn’t technically be correct to call this “borrow checking,” but in practice when people talk about “Rust’s borrow checker” they’re talking about all of the static analysis Rust does to ensure memory safety, for which I think this qualifies.
A short guide on OCaml type checker, describing the surprisingly elegant algorithm for generalization, which generalizes to first-class polymorphism, MLF and local types. Polymorphism and regions have much in common.
Even relatively new C programmers have no trouble reading simple C declarations such as
This article attempts to outline, in informal terms, a new theory of combinators, related to the theory of Combinatory Logic pioneered by Moses Schonfinkel, Haskell Curry, and others in the 1930s. Although not essential, an understanding of the classical theory of combinators may be helpful (see the links at the…
Or: The Most Expensive Linked List I’ve Ever Written
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
My book Crafting Interpreters on programming languages is done. OK, OK. I know I said it was done like fifteen months ago . But now it’s really done. And by that I mean, the print, e-book and PDF versions are done. You can buy it . You can hold it in your hands. And I do mean “hands” plural. Because this little…
In the 1950s, computers did not really interoperate. ARPANET has not yet happened (that would become a thing in the 60s), and every operating system was typically tied to the hardware that was meant to run on. Most communication actually happened over telephone, and no company was more present in that space than the…
Ever since I finished publishing the “defer” paper and successfully defended it on its first go-around (it now has tentative approval to go to a Technical Specification, I just need to obtain the necessary written boilerplate to do so), an old criticism
Sit beside me and hear this crazy old man's tale of when I asked Rust for too much
Review about V programming language in 2023
The ride is coming to an end. The experiment is done. We tried, but we admit defeat. Four years ago we started adding support for an alternative HTTP backend in curl. It would use a library written in rust, called hyper. The idea was to introduce an alternative implementation of HTTP internals that you could ……
Scope. To talk about C++’s current safety problems and solutions well, I need to include the context of the broad landscape of security and safety threats facing all software. I chair the ISO C++ s…
Some time later, I came across Iavor�s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called � The Evolution of a Programmer � in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment�s thought turned up the factorial…
Overture to our small Lisp to x86-64 compiler
Reviewing the JIT in Python 3.13
This is my closing talk ( video ) from the GopherConAU conference in Sydney, given November 10, 2023, the 14th anniversary of Go being lau...
To bootstrap Rust, no cost is too great.
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…
In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them:
