Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 63 posts.
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.
While working on an article for the Monad.Reader, I’ve had the opportunity to think about how people learn and gain intuition for abstraction, and the implications for pedagogy. The heart of …
Focus on debugging your application rather than debugging your programming language knowledge.
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:
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the IEEE’s ‘Computer’ magazine..
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...
This PEP is a tutorial for the pattern matching introduced by PEP 634.
It turns out my hopes were answered. First, Prechelt published another article that covers Tcl, Python, Perl, and Rexx. Also, Ron Garret (nee Erann Gat) did a follow-up study in which he asked programmers to write Prechelt's test program in Lisp. His results show that the resulting Lisp programs ran faster on average…
This paper appears in Advances in Exception Handling Techniques , edited by A. Romanovsky, C. Dony, J.L. Knudsen, and A. Tripathi. This book, published in 2001, is part of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2022 , published by Springer .
Once upon a time, someone with the handle “entha_saava” posted this question on Hacker News :
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…
What is threaded code? What is it good for? What are the differences between the various threading techniques? How do I implement threaded code portably? How fast are various threading techniques?
A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. – Alan Perlis
We present Logica, a novel open source Logic Programming language.
Algebraic effects and handlers provide a modular abstraction for expressing effectful computation, allowing the programmer to separate the expression of an effectful computation from its implementation. In this post, I will present an extension to OCaml for programming with linear algebraic effects, and demonstrate…
This information is provided for programmers familiar with Common Lisp or Scheme.
This post is for all of the miscellaneous features that arent large enough to get their own individual posts. If you havent read all of them, here are the links to the previous posts on recompilation , inspection , class … Read the rest
I’ve spent the last year building keyboards , which has included writing firmware for a variety custom circuit boards.
Beautiful Racket
No matter what language you program in or what applications you use: everything you do with a computer today is powered at some level by a piece of C/C++ code.
The Go standard library’s net.IP type is problematic for a number of reasons. We wrote a new one.
A mega-rant about all the things I find bad about Julia.
Collected quotes and snippets from people publicly sneezing off or belittling what curl is, explaining how easy it would be to make a replacement in no time with no effort or generally not being very helpful. These are statements made seriously. For all I know, they were not ironic. If you find others to add ……
I’ve recently come back to an older project of mine (that powers this website), and as I did some maintenance work: upgrade to newer crates, upgrade to a newer rustc, I noticed that my build was ta...
For the past year, the [Sorbet](https://sorbet.org/) team has been working on an experimental, ahead-of-time compiler for Ruby, powered by Sorbet and LLVM. Today we're sharing the source code for it. It lives alongside the existing code for Sorbet on GitHub, mostly in the `compiler/` folder:
I’ve been thinking about garbage collection in Rust for a long time, ever since I started working on Servo’s JS layer. I’ve designed a GC library, …
