61
The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
One keyboard bug three decades in the making
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,707 posts.
62
Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way
japanese verbs are awesome. you can take the dictionary form of a verb (for example, "taberu", to eat) and turn it into many forms: taberu ("eat"): tabemasu…
63
Excessive nil pointer checks in Go
Let’s talk about nil pointer checks in Go. You want to prevent panics in production, but that doesn’t start with a deferred recover. It starts with defensive programming. Check your inputs, check your bounds, and check pointers for nil before dereferencing them. I’ve started to see more nil checks in Go code. In the…
64
Lisp's Influence on Ruby
Once I wrote users.select { |u| u.admin? }.map(&:email) and realized I’d written Lisp.
65
C++: The Documentary
C++: The Documentary premiered today on YouTube, and it was great to be on the live chat with Bjarne and many other key folks who participated in C++’s history. I’m honored to have been…
66
My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month
I am now generating this website with Clojure (yes, right after rewriting it in GNU Make and shell ; I have a problem, ok?). In a personal tradition, I used writing a static site generator as the project to play with and learn Clojure as a new language. While I’ve long scoffed at Clojure for its copious syntax ( three…
67
QBE – Compiler Backend – 1.3
QBE 1.3 took a while to cook, but it is the most significant release since 1.0 with around 7k new lines of code and 1.5k deleted ones. In addition to the usual bug fixes, QBE gained a new and original IL matching algorithm, new optimizations from Roland Paterson-Jones, Scott Graham added support for the Windows ABI…
68
Why Janet? (2023)
I never thought it could happen to me. I mean, parentheses? In this day and age? But for the past couple years, my go-to programming language for fun side projects has been a little Lisp dialect called Janet. (print "hey janet") I like Janet so much that I wrote an entire book about it, and put it on The Internet for…
69
70
From Rust to Ruby
Who does things like that?!? Apparently: me. I have my own project, written in Rust. Not a big one, mind you, maybe approx. 30k lines of code in total. Rust is verbose so it’s not really that impressive. I’ve put it aside for some time and was toying with local inference, LLMs, writing agents and my attention was…
71
C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers
Anyone who's written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn't for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and…
72
C array types are weird
C array types are weird. In this article I’ll explain what I find weird about them, what I’d do differently, and ramble on a few related things.
73
Opaque Types in Python
A proposed technique for exposing an opaque data structure with idiomatic modern Python.
74
A Forth-inspired language for writing websites
I don't remember where the idea came from, but I decided that it would be cool if I could write websites using a stack-based language. Something like this: : h1 ( s -- ) "<h1>" emit . "</h1>" em…
75
.NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
In this post I discuss the support for union types released in .NET 11, how they're implemented, the choices made, and how to create your own
76
I keep bouncing off the Scheme language
I have a huge appreciation for the Scheme programming language. I just seem to be unable to get it to stick in my head. This seems like a huge revelation for someone who named their blog after the Scheme textbook, but there it is. This post is the public admission I need to make, to...
77
C constructs that still don't work in C++
A 2026 sequel to C Constructs That Don't Work in C++: what still breaks, what C++20 changed, and what C23 changed.
78
Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines
It's that time of the year again, a new version of Python is just around the corner. With the Python 3.15.0b1 feature freeze, we know what's...
79
SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard (2014)
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
80
sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library
Over the past year, I’ve been working on fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library. It is not a simple wrapper on top of libc; it doesn’t depend on libc except when required to by the platform. To my knowledge, there is nothing like it.
81
PHP's Oddities
flow2 | Blog post: 'PHP's Oddities' in Tech
82
83
Prolog Basics Explained with Pokémon
Demonstrating the basics of logic programming with data from the Pokémon games.
84
85
How do I deal with memory leaks? (2022)
These are questions about C++ Style and Technique that people ask me often. If you have better questions or comments on the answers, feel free to email me (bs at cs dot tamu dot edu). Please remember that I can't spend all of my time improving my homepages.
86
Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder)
In mid-December last year I started making my own programming language. It's waaay far from any production quality yet (though I did manage to write a working 1k LOC Monte-Carlo path tracer in it), but the project is on pause right now, so I figured it's a good time to write something about it.
87
Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell
Scheme (and Lisp) lets you express complex systems and problem domains in simpler terms than any other language can. For all its brilliance, Haskell resists most of the attempts people make to just hack and write useful code quickly.
88
WASM is not quite a stack machine
Everyone knows Wasm is a stack machine. Wikipedia says so, the official Wasm design specification says so, you get it. I thought so too. That is, until I started writing Wasm code – not compiling for Wasm, but writing the instructions by hand. And I found out that there exists a major difference between Wasm and all…
89
“Why not just use Lean?”
I have been told that when proposing to formalise mathematics these days, you have to explain why you are not using Lean. And that reminds me why I left the dependent-typed world 40 years ago: its cultism, insularity and conformity. Lean is a great language with good tools, a large library and a huge, enthusiastic…
90
Box to save memory in Rust
dystroy - blog