Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,045 posts.
Update: If you’re coming to this blog post from a compendium titled “Go is not good,” I want to make it clear that I am ashamed to be on such a list. Go is absolutely the least worst programming language I’ve ever used. At the time I wrote this, I wanted to curb a trend I was seeing, namely, overuse of one of the more…
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...
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
How and why to use the Go race detector to improve your programs.
By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I've seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler. But I've never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it's with great pleasure that I can…
This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23 . The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the…
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…
The Scala language is large and complex, and it provides a variety of tools that a developer can use to do the same thing in a variety of ways. Given the range of possible solutions to every problem, how can a developer choose which one should be used? This is the first in a series of blog posts aiming to provide…
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This paper appears in Lisp and Symbolic Computation , Volume 1, No. 1, June 1988, pp81-101.
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…
October 1997: It has been six years since I finished Paradigms of AI Programming (or PAIP ), and now seems like a good time to look back at how Lisp and AI programming have changed.
(You probably already have realized this.) The reason the compiler produced code that terminated was based upon the fact that the values being altered (i.e., a, b and c) within the “while” loop are never referenced again after the loop. But, once you added code which printed the resulting values it was forced to…
What is threaded code? What is it good for? What are the differences between the various threading techniques? How do I implement threaded code portably? How fast are various threading techniques?
Here is some practical evidence: According to the most recent 2002 North American Developer Survey by Evans Data Corporation, over half the developers surveyed are using Java. About 1/7 of developers surveyed are using C#. Roughly half of those also use Java, so the fraction of surveyed developers using one or both is…
This PEP specifies how Python software packages should specify what build dependencies they have in order to execute their chosen build system. As part of this specification, a new configuration file is introduced for software packages to use to specify...
I've written previously about the problem recursive descent parsers have with expressions, especially when the language has multiple levels of operator precedence.
A lot of people remarked that in my post on Tail Recursion Elimination I confused tail self-recursion with other tail calls, which proper T...
A tour of free monads and their motivating use cases
Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and …
This PEP suggests to support non-ASCII letters (such as accented characters, Cyrillic, Greek, Kanji, etc.) in Python identifiers.
Context free grammars (CFGs) are a valuable theoretical tool on which the modern compilation theory relies for parsing the code of programming languages. For example, the most popular tool used for parsing – YACC , generates parsers for CFGs. What most people don’t know 1 is that the vast majority of programming…
I’ve been doing a lot of work, lately, with JavaScript inheritance – namely for my work-in-progress JavaScript book – and in doing so have examined a number of different JavaScript classical-inheritance-simulating techniques. Out of all the ones that I’ve looked at I think my favorites were the implementations…
One of the greatest feature of the Rebol language has always been its parsing engine, simply called Parse. It is an amazing piece of des...
(These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.) 1. Programming Languages Are for People. Programming languages are how people talk to computers. The computer would be just as happy speaking any language that was unambiguous. The reason we have high level…
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
An introduction to Go errors.
