The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.
In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got
It’s been just over two years since I started learning Rust. Since then, I’ve used it heavily at my day job, including work in the Firecracker code base, and a number of other projects. Rust is a great fit for the systems-level work I’ve been doing over the last few years: often performance- and density-sensitive…
Blog of Guillaume Gomez (Guide on how to write documentation for a Rust crate)
You can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family, an’ they’re still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge ’em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don’t.
I’d originally planned to write on this particular topic in response to increasing outreach to me personally, through my blog and other places, unsolicited, and independently from multiple communit…
How a Python function relates to a two thousand year old debate in philosophy
Lisp has done quite well over the last ten years: becoming nearly standardized, forming the basis of a commercial sector, achieving excellent performance, having good environments, able to deliver applications. Yet the Lisp community has failed to do as well as it could have. In this paper I look at the successes, the…
A report on the 1980 LISP conference at Stanford University, held the week after the AAAI Artificial Intelligence Conference. Written for Byte.
Recently, I got yet another nice email from a “talent sourcing specialist” asking me if I’d like to work for their company. This one stood out from the usual blockchain recruiting spam by actually looking at this blog. And they told me their expectations were lowered by the front matter stating that I’m currently…
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It is a lazy Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps you were idly browsing your favorite news aggregator, or visiting The Orange Website to wade through murky startup groupthink in search of interesting links.
flex and bison still work, but modern parser generators beat them on Unicode, grammar format, keeping code out of the grammar, and documentation. A point-by-point comparison.
A gentle and beginner friendly overview of Rust Ownership Rules
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...
For about five years I've been trying to implement a fully conforming C preprocessor for the front end of the CScout refactoring browser. I've found this to be a fiendishly difficult task. Although what I have written can correctly process million-line real-life projects, every once in a while I come across a…
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...
Discovering one of the pillars of C++ generic programming.
...everything that's wrong with C++ comes down to that. Background: I've been programming in C++ since about 1993; that's 17 years now. As...
When asked about the virtues of Haskell’s strong type system, most people will say the best part is that it lets you refactor with a zen-like tranquility, or that it stops your program from crashing at runtime. I mean, those are both great. But my favorite part is that having a strong type system means I don’t need to…
In my last blog post I wrote about the power of D’s compile-time reflection and string mixins, showing how they could be used to call D from Python so easily it might as well be magic. As ama…
C++ “move” semantics are simple, and unchanged since C++11. But they are still widely misunderstood, sometimes because of unclear teaching and sometimes because of a desire to view move…
The chart classifies programming paradigms according to their kernel languages. Kernel languages are ordered according to the creative extension principle: a new concept is added when it cannot be encoded with only local transformations. Two languages that implement the same paradigm can nevertheless have very…
Every once in a while I receive an email from a fellow programmer asking me what language I used for one of my games and how I learned it. Here is an entry that list the best things to read about C. If you know of other gems, please email me or add a comment at the bottom of the page.
Some hints and tips for getting started with Mypy and introducing it to existing projects
