Rust, an Anti-Sloppy Programming Language
Arthur’s thoughts on coding, software engineering, and other interesting things.
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.
Arthur’s thoughts on coding, software engineering, and other interesting things.
Fun with functional programming in Python | Ben Kurtovic's blog
The current OCamlXARM compiles by default for iOS 7.1, but using it for iOS 8 is not too difficult. The only thing that changes is the name of the SDK, which can be specified with the -ccopt option of ocamlopt.
Much has been written about Go’s interfaces . They’re one of the language features I like best, providing a very pragmatic trade-off between the complexity of more powerful type systems and the anarchy of duck typing. If you’re not already familiar with Go or Go’s interfaces, I’d encourage you to read an introduction…
In order to give some structure to my ongoing investigation of git’s data structures, protocols and implementation I decided to re-implement git clone without using any of git’s plumbing commands or any of the existing git libraries. Along the way I tried to keep some implementation notes that should help to…
Do you remember how we first met, back in 2012? I thought your functional approach was fresh, and different. For a while I believed we were made for each other. A first project was a success; on my own I was comfortable with the good parts of you. But as soon as I started working in teams writing Scala, your immense…
Some things about the R programming language that programmers coming from other languages are likely to trip over.
I've been building enterprise Java web apps since servlets were created. In that time the Java ecosystem has changed a lot but sadly many enterprise Java…
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
In September, 2004, I posted a query to the Types list asking people to name the five most important papers ever written in the area of programming languages. This page collects the responses I received. (A few are missing because I am still tracking down bibliographic information.)
I used to ask interviewees, “What’s your favorite programming language?” The answer was nearly always, “I just choose the right language for the job.” Duh. Does anyone ever deliberately pick the wrong language? This was clearly a way to avoid actually naming a language for fear of picking one I didn’t like.
Arthur’s thoughts on coding, software engineering, and other interesting things.
Why a programming language should not offer a primitive to capture undelimited continuations (call/cc).
Introduction Link to heading Several months ago, I promised to write an updated version of my old post, “The State of Statistics in Julia”, that would describe how Julia’s support for statistical computing has evolved since December 2012. I’ve kept putting off writing that post for several reasons, but the most…
"Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul." -John Carmack When the complexity of modern computing gets fatiguing, I look back to the simpler machines of my childhood. I grew up surrounded by various 8-bit and 16-bit machines (most of them already a few years outdated at the time),…
There is no clear, widely-accepted definition of Functional Programming. It is a collection of related featues which cohere well into a very useful style of programming.
Hello everyone! Time for a bit of a diversion towards one of my favorite projects, Hy ! (I'm an occasional committer, but the main mastermind behind the project is my good friend Paul Tagliamonte .) For those of you who don't know, Hy is a Lisp that transforms into the Python AST. Even more fun: you can import .hy…
Some time ago i started to write series of blog posts about assembly programming for x86_64. You can find it by asm tag. Unfortunately i wa...
When I teach courses on Python for scientific computing, I make this point very early in the course, and tell the students why: it boils down to Python being a dynamically typed, interpreted language, where values are stored not in dense buffers but in scattered objects. And then I talk about how to get around this by…
Alright, guys. Today I want to talk about programming. It is interesting to note that I have solved it. Yes, I solved it. Here are my…
There has been a lot of discussion lately about Rust’s allocator story, and in particular our relationship to jemalloc. I’ve been trying to catch up, and I wanted to try and summarize my understanding and explain for others what is going on. I am trying to be as factually precise in this post as possible. If you see a…
Compiler Design in C Download a copy! My book Compiler Design in C is now, unfortunately, out of print. You can download a complete copy, with the above button (pdf 19.1Mb OCR/Searchable—thanks to Marvin Hernández for adding the OCR). If you don’t want to print it out (the book is 984 pages long), you can…
There are some pretty strong statements about types floating around out there. The claims range from the oft-repeated phrase that when you get the types to line up, everything just works, to “not relying on type safety is unethical (if you have an SLA)” 1 , " It boils down to cost vs benefit, actual studies, and…