Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,045 posts.
April 2001, rev. April 2003 (This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.) In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb . Our plan was to write software that would let end users build online stores. What was novel about this software, at the…
This science fiction / comedy / completely serious talk traces the history of JavaScript, and programming in general, from 1995 until 2035. It's not pro- or anti-JavaScript; the language's flaws are discussed frankly, but its ultimate impact on the industry is tremendously positive. For Gary's more serious (and less…
This talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes every other week, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git.
(This article has been translated into Spanish (PDF, with some additions) by Jorge Amado Soria Ramirez — thanks!) Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us
This document gives coding conventions for the Python code comprising the standard library in the main Python distribution. Please see the companion informational PEP describing style guidelines for the C code in the C implementation of Python.
Historically, I’ve struggled to find a concise, simple way to explain what it means to practice type-driven design. Too often, when someone asks me “How did you come up with this approach?” I find I can’t give them a satisfying answer. I know it didn’t just come to me in a vision—I have an iterative design process…
Long time Pythoneer Tim Peters succinctly channels the BDFL’s guiding principles for Python’s design into 20 aphorisms, only 19 of which have been written down.
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:
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
This is the story of the rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab as told from my personal (and highly biased) point of view. I am not writing in my official capacity as an employee of JPL, nor am I in any way representing the official position of JPL. (This will become rather obvious shortly.)
Why does this matter? As Steve Yegge said , "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work." Yegge describes 8 problems that can be solved with compilers (or equally well with interpreters, or with Yegge's typical heavy dosage of cynicism).
(This is a modified version of the keynote talk given by Rob Pike at the SPLASH 2012 conference in Tucson, Arizona, on October 25, 2012.)
People occasionally ask why LLVM-compiled code sometimes generates SIGTRAP signals when the optimizer is turned on. After digging in, they find that Clang generated a "ud2" instruction (assuming X86 code) - the same as is generated by __builtin_trap().
(This article has been translated into Spanish (PDF, with some additions) by Jorge Amado Soria Ramirez — thanks!) Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us
The expressive power of Lisp has drawbacks.
A more permanent version of this article is stored at GitHub . Please link to that rather than to here. If you hadn't guessed, this is about...
May 2002 "We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec In the software business there is an ongoing struggle between the pointy-headed academics, and another equally formidable force, the pointy-haired bosses. Everyone knows who…
An article about Lisp programming language.
Dr. Alan Kay explains when "object-oriented" was first used and what it means. []
Slides and videos explaining a functional approach to error handling
There are some pretty strong statements about types floating around out there. The claims range from the oft-repeated phrase that when you get the types to line up, everything just works, to “not relying on type safety is unethical (if you have an SLA)” 1 , " It boils down to cost vs benefit, actual studies, and…
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...
One of Lisp's great features is its condition system. It serves a similar purpose to the exception handling systems in Java, Python, and C++ but is more flexible. In fact, its flexibility extends beyond error handling--conditions are more general than exceptions in that a condition can represent any occurrence during…
Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? Did you ever get an email from your friends in…
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
