Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 71 posts.
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…
Encoding business logic in types
What follows is a set of short essays that collectively encourage a philosophy of clarity in programming rather than giving hard rules. I don't expect you to agree with all of them, because they are opinion and opinions change with the times. But they've been accumulating in my head, if not on paper until now, for a…
I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familia...
Project Loom's mission is to make it easier to write, debug, profile and maintain concurrent applications meeting today's requirements. Threads, provided by Java from its first day, are a natural and convenient concurrency construct (putting aside the separate question of communication among threads) which is being…
I normally do not read comp.lang.c, but Jim McKie told me that `` Duff's device '' had come up in comp.lang.c again. I have lost the version that was sent to netnews in May 1984, but I have reproduced below the note in which I originally proposed the device. (If anybody has a copy of the netnews version, I would…
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
“The Implementation of Functional Languages” is a book about implementing functional programming languages using lazy graph reduction, and it divides into three parts. The first part describes how to translate a high-level functional language into an intermediate language, called the lambda calculus, incuding detailed…
Clojure is a dynamic development environment where you interact with your program while you write it, growing and adding to it while it’s running. To work with Clojure you need an editor that supports evaluation in source files and structural editing (working with nested forms in addition to character editing).
This PEP describes an addition to the standard library called Data Classes. Although they use a very different mechanism, Data Classes can be thought of as “mutable namedtuples with defaults”. Because Data Classes use normal class definition syntax, y...
Update: This post got a sequel, Breaking our latin-1 assumptions. I’ve seen misconceptions about Unicode crop up regularly in posts discussing it. …
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"...
How we will all work together toward Go 2.
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...
Since you talk about the sanitizers and tools like Checked-C, I’ll note there’s also SaferCPlusPlus[1], which is essentially a memory-safe (and data race safe) subset of C++. The idea is that there are a finite number of C++ elements that contribute to memory unsafety, and since the advent of C++11, it is now…
There are many descriptions floating around the internet, trying to explain functional programming in simple terms. Unfortunately, most discuss details only loosely related to functional programming, while others focus on topics that are completely irrelevant. So of course, I had to write my own!
Disclaimer: Most patterns are easy to implement because we use dynamic typing, functional programming and, of course, Clojure. Some of them look wrong and ugly. It’s okay. All characters are fake, coincidences are accidental.
(N.B. The word “fuck” appears multiple times in this post. I recommend that the reader temporarily not consider “fuck” as profanity, as it isn’t used that way here.)
Almost five months ago, I wrote a blog post about my new programming language, Hackett , a fanciful sketch of a programming language from a far-off land with Haskell’s type system and Racket’s macros. At that point in time, I had a little prototype that barely worked, that I barely understood, and was a little bit of…
I’ve been working on an experimental new C++ language feature tentatively called “metaclasses” that aims to make C++ programming both more powerful and simpler. You can find out about it here: Curr…
Technical articles by Kevin Menard. Topics include Ruby, Java, machine learning, and general computing.
An obscure research project could radically accelerate innovation in programming language design
I’ve been pondering this subject for a while, and I think I’m finally ready to write about it. Tcl was, for many years, my go-to language of choice. It’s still near and dear to me…
