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Racket: From PLT Scheme to Racket
The Scheme part of the name PLT Scheme is misleading, and it is often an obstacle to explaining and promoting PLT research and tools.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,045 posts.
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A half-hour to learn Rust
In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it. But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means? In this article, instead of focusing on one or...
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93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)
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?
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The relative performance of C and Rust
My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…
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Generating code
How to use go generate.
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Pratt Parsers: Expression Parsing Made Easy (2011)
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…
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The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)
[This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he…
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Tail Recursion Elimination
I recently posted an entry in my Python History blog on the origins of Python's functional features . A side remark about not supporting ta...
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PEP 393 – Flexible String Representation
The Unicode string type is changed to support multiple internal representations, depending on the character with the largest Unicode ordinal (1, 2, or 4 bytes). This will allow a space-efficient representation in common cases, but give access to full UC...
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Baby's First Garbage Collector
When I get stressed out and have too much to do, I have this paradoxical reaction where I escape from that by coming up with another thing to do. Usually it’s a tiny self-contained program that I can write and finish.
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Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn't (2019)
For those who don’t follow Swift’s development, ABI stability has been one of its most ambitious projects and possibly it’s defining feature, and it finally shipped in Swift 5 . The result is something I find endlessly fascinating, because I think Swift has pushed the notion of ABI stability farther than any language…
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The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)
You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. Robin Williams
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SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard (2014)
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
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Clojure: Transducers
Transducers are composable algorithmic transformations. They are independent from the context of their input and output sources and specify only the essence of the transformation in terms of an individual element. Because transducers are decoupled from input or output sources, they can be used in many different…
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The Next Big Language
Dylan? C# 3? Perl 6? Does it have deterministic destructors, even as blocks like Python 2.5? Generics? A powerful macro system? Even as described it sounds like magic, but not a moment too soon.
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Monads are like burritos (2009)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Go Data Structures: Interfaces (2009)
Go's interfaces—static, checked at compile time, dynamic when asked for—are, for me, the most exciting part of Go from a language design point of view. If I could export one feature of Go into other languages, it would be interfaces.
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Yacc is dead: An update
The draft of " Yacc is Dead " that David Darais and I posted on arXiv received some attention, so we'd like to share updates and feedback.
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Strings, bytes, runes and characters in Go
How strings work in Go, and how to use them.
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Wizards and warriors, part one
A common problem I see in object-oriented design is: A wizard is a kind of player. A warrior is a kind of player. A staff is a kind of weapon. A sword is a kind of weapon. A player has a weapon. Bu…
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PEP 636 – Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial
This PEP is a tutorial for the pattern matching introduced by PEP 634.
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C11 and C17 Standard Support Arriving in MSVC
Please see our Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 Preview 3 release notes for more of our latest features. Update: Windows 10 SDK version 2104 has been
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A 10x Faster TypeScript
Embarking on a native port of the existing TypeScript compiler and toolset to achieve a 10x performance speed-up.