Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,045 posts.
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…
(This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp .) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as…
Ever wondered how Clojure's persistent vector actually works? This is part 1 of a blog series which aims to explain them.
The programming language Pascal has become the dominant language of instruction in computer science education. It has also strongly influenced languages developed subsequently, in particular Ada.
While reviewing some of the comments on my post about parallelism and concurrency, I noticed that the great fallacy about dynamic and static languages continues to hold people in its thrall. So, i…
Go is defined to be a safe language. Indices into array or string references must be in bounds; there is no way to reinterpret the bits of one type as another, no way to conjure a pointer out of thin air; and there is no way to release memory, so no chance of “ dangling pointer ” errors and the associated memory…
They’re not burritos.
I'm developing a programming language called Kernel. Kernel is a conservative, Scheme-like dialect of Lisp in which everything is a first-class object.
Focus on debugging your application rather than debugging your programming language knowledge.
A recipe for a functional app, part 2
An introduction to Zig's curious concurrent programming API.
I've gotten a bunch of emails asking for advice on how to learn Common Lisp in the present day. I decided to write down all the advice I've been giving through email and social media posts in the hopes that someone might find it useful.
If Zig code doesn’t look like it’s jumping away to call a function, then it isn’t. This means you can be sure that the following code calls only foo() and then bar() , and this is guaranteed without needing to know the types of anything:
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.
Here's a language that gives near-C performance that feels like Python or Ruby with optional type annotations (that you can feed to one of two static analysis tools ) that has good support for macros plus decent-ish support for FP, plus a lot more. What's not to like? I'm mostly not going to talk about how great Julia…
The tokens #t and #f are the True and False literals, respectively. The single quote mark serves to quote the following expression. The syntax ' exp is completely equivalent to (quote exp ) . The backquote character ` is called quasiquote in Scheme; it is similar to ' except that within a quasiquoted expression, the…
Idioms and patterns for handling errors in Go.
This post is part of the series “Debris: Opening the box”. Okay, previous posts from this series aimed to actually convey useful technical information: assuming you actually want to wri…
Why a programming language should not offer a primitive to capture undelimited continuations (call/cc).
Why I can't use Elm, and can't recommend it to others.
In short, because we are greedy....
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.
What implications exist around linking friendly-c code with machiavellian-c? I.e. put the performance critical kernels in there own module and work realy hard to make it correct.
A list of things about unicode on Linux and Python 3 you really did not want to know.
Watch Rob Pike's talk, _Concurrency is not parallelism._
Encoding business logic in types
