Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,045 posts.
“If you don’t know how compilers work, then you don’t know how computers work. If you’re not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don’t know how they work.” — Steve Yegge There you have it. Think about it. It doesn’t really matter …
Update: This post got a sequel, Breaking our latin-1 assumptions. I’ve seen misconceptions about Unicode crop up regularly in posts discussing it. …
Visit the post for more.
Learning modern JavaScript is tough if you haven’t been there since the beginning. The ecosystem is growing and changing so rapidly that…
Customers and stakeholders have substantial investments in, and are comfortable with the performance, security and stability of, industry-standard platforms like the JVM. While Java developers may envy the succinctness, flexibility and productivity of dynamic languages, they have concerns about running on…
Another enjoyable read. Thanks! One thing, though -- it's about time to update your understandings of Python's object system. Python's culture doesn't insist that traditional (Smalltalkish) OO is the One True Way to re-use code, but that doesn't mean that everything in Python is not an object (because they are, since…
We are improving and enriching the connections between the Java virtual machine and well-defined but “foreign” (non-Java) APIs, including many interfaces commonly used by C programmers.
I occasionally get asked about whether, or how well, Visual C++ supports C99. This week, I just posted two replies to this questions on UserVoice (merged below). Last fall, I also answered it in an…
An introduction to the Go's defer, panic, and recover control flow mechanisms.
Tuple parameter unpacking is the use of a tuple as a parameter in a function signature so as to have a sequence argument automatically unpacked. An example is:
Visit the post for more.
How to implement type classes in terms of term-level data structures
After a lengthy design process (https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/8450) and preliminary foundations in Julia 0.5 (/blog/2016-10-11-julia-0.5-highlights#vectorized_function_calls), Julia 0.6 includes new facilities for writing code in the "vectorized"...
tl;dr I’m burying the lede with context and catch-up material first, so impatient or already-clued-in readers should skip to below the videos for today’s big news. Or just read Luke Wagner ‘s blog post right now.
How we will all work together toward Go 2.
Let me preface this with an apology: this is a technology love story, and as such, it’s long, rambling, sentimental and personal. Also befitting a love story, it has a When Harry Met Sally feel to it, in that its origins are inauspicious…
I used to ask interviewees, “What’s your favorite programming language?” The answer was nearly always, “I just choose the right language for the job.” Duh. Does anyone ever deliberately pick the wrong language? This was clearly a way to avoid actually naming a language for fear of picking one I didn’t like.
Please note that this post expresses my personal opinion and mine alone, not those of my employer or my teammates.
LRtDW is a series of articles putting Rust features in context for low-level C programmers who maybe don’t have a formal CS background — the sort of people who work on firmware, game engines, OS kernels, and the like. Basically, people like me.
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.
This is a companion post to my discussion with Craig Andera on Relevance Podcast Episode 32 and my Clojure/West talk Clojure in the Large. I've talked about ...
By Robert Smith, Elias Lawson-Fox, Cole Scott Updated July 1, 2025 by Robert Smith. Introduction Coalton is a statically typed functional programming language built with Common Lisp. We can load it like a normal Lisp library. CL-USER> (asdf:load-system "coalton") CL-USER> (in-package #:coalton-user) COALTON-USER> This…
