Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 62 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…
My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over. This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing tho...
Starting Forth has always been the fun way to learn Forth programming. This free, online edition uses updated code that runs on modern Forth systems.
This post explains why Rust made sense for Discord to reimplement: how it was done, and the resulting performance improvements.
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
In an article recently linked from reddit entitled Tour de Babel you can read (among lots of other nonsense): Heck, people still use Tcl as an embedded interpreter, even though Python is far superior to Tcl in every conceivable way -- except, that is, for the frost thing.
I keep seeing discussions that equate zig's level of memory safety with c (or occasionally with rust!). Neither is particularly accurate. This is an attempt at a more detailed breakdown.
It happened. Nearly 5 years of paper writing, being snuck Committee Meeting notes on the DL until I could access them myself and absolve my co-conspirators of their sins, 5 different implementations/patches later, I can
Go Generics are a long-awaited feature added in Go 1.18. This article covers how generics were implemented in Go and some surprising ways they can impact your code.
We announce and explore the possibilities for bringing set-theoretic types into Elixir.
PHP, as the result of a spectacular error of judgement, appears to be written in US English. How do we developers ensure the traditions of the British Empire continue to be upheld, even in the digital age?
V is a programming language promising to be “Simple, fast, safe, compiled. For developing maintainable software.” V has a controversial past but what is the state of V in 2022?
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.
It’s funny - I have shared this story a handful of times with friends of mine who are qualified, competent software engineers, and each time the response was confusion about why any of this would be necessary or even remotely helpful. WebAssembly ?!
Introducing a new programming language.
Today we're excited to announce our support and collaboration on a new Stage 0 proposal to bring optional and erasable type syntax to JavaScript. Because
Binary lambda calculus ( BLC ) is a minimal, pure functional programming language invented by John Tromp in 2004, 1 based on a binary encoding of the untyped lambda calculus in De Bruijn index notation.
I've debated with myself for several years about whether or not to write this down. After so much time has passed, the facts are confused, 20/20 hindsight creeps in, and selective memory plays a role in how fairly I can portray the events. Many reporters have asked me my version of these past few years, several have…
In which ChatGPT and I invent a fictional language spoken by slime-people
This is a short overview of the development that's gone into "Kandria"(https://kandria.com), the open world action RPG I've been working on in recent years.
Rust is a programming language implemented as a set of open source projects. It combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java. Rust started in 2006 as a personal project of Graydon Hoare before becoming a research project at…
Lil is part of the technology that powers Decker , a multimedia creative tool inspired by HyperCard . Decker uses Lil for adding custom behavior to decks and the widgets within. Lil is designed to be learned in layers, but it is a richly multi-paradigm language which incorporates ideas from imperative, functional…
I often write pieces that showcase how well Rust can work for you, and how it can let you build powerful abstractions, and prevents you from making a bunch of mistakes. If you read something like S...
A strong runner up was this quote, which captures the essence of what we should be trying to do when creating new languages:
