The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 264 posts.
Everything was fine until BASIC entered the picture. Edsger Dijkstra in a hallucination of 2023’s AI Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally…
I've done a lot in my career. From working on business support software to big backend systems and even robotics. If there's been a consistent through-line to my career, it's the Ruby programming language.
Zig is a new, independently developed low-level programming language. It’s a modern reimagining of C that attempts to retain C’s performance while embracing improvements from the last 30 years of tooling and language design. Zig makes calling into C code easier than any other language I’ve used. Zig also treats unit…
Static vs dynamic typing debates often flounder because the debators see from two different perspectives without knowing it. Learning to identify the two perspectives can calm the discussion. The tension between the two perspectives has led to Gradual Typing and other technologies.
Users of mature C libraries conventionally get to choose how memory is allocated — that is, when it cannot be avoided entirely . The C standard never laid down a convention — perhaps for the better — so each library re-invents an allocator interface. Not all are created equal, and most repeat a few fundamental…
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I recently wrote a small 16-bit Forth for 8086 PCs running DOS. I built the basic one-liner loop words that can trivially be built with j...
Ruby's `private` keyword means something different compared to basically all other object-oriented languages. Most other languages don't even have a feature matching what Ruby calls `private`, but incredibly, Scala does, which it calls `protected[this]` (meaning
Understand the mechanics of dynamic dispatch implementation in CPython
People keep asking why Jepsen is written in Clojure , so I figure it’s worth having a referencable answer. I’ve programmed in something like twenty languages. Why choose a Weird Lisp?
Or, about the virtue of exactly one phrase.
Python and Go have distinct qualities that can complement each other.
Or, how the feature that allows to write less names might make the code more explicit.
Common Lisp programming is often presented as “interactive”. In most languages, modifications to your program are applied by recompiling it and restarting it. In contrast, Common Lisp lets…
“People say, It’s just glorified autocomplete . . . Now, let’s analyze that. Suppose you want to be really good at predicting the next word. If you want to be really good, you have to understand what’s being said. That’s the only way. So by training something to be really good at predicting the next word, you’re…
A look into the implementation details of CPython's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and how they changed between Python 3.9 and the current development branch that will become Python 3.13.
In 2013, I had an idea: "what if I were to build my programming language?". Back then my idea came down to "an interpreted language that mixes elements from Ruby and Smalltalk", and not much more.
wingolog: article: i accidentally a scheme
“shouldn’t this have been published a few months ago?” yeah, probably. I even considered submitting it to the AoC contest. time is a real beast. The title is clickbait. I did not design and implement a programming language for the sole or even primary purpose of leaderboarding on Advent of Code. It just turned out…
Part 1: expressions, arithmetic Part 2: statements, control flow Ever since I was a teenager I wanted to create my own systems pr...
Four years ago today, the Rust async/await feature was released in version 1.39.0. The announcement post says that “this work has been a long time in development – the key ideas for zero-cost futures, for example, were first proposed by Aaron Turon and Alex Crichton in 2016”. It’s now been longer since the release of…
My Thursday CppCon talk is now online. Note: There’s already a Reddit thread for it, so if you want to comment on the video I suggest you use that thread instead of creating a new one. At Cpp…
If we go through the list of C++23 features, we can stumble upon the notion of garbage collection twice. Once among the language and once among the library features. Both entries refer to the same paper (P2186R2): garbage collection (GC in short) support is getting removed from C++. Just to make it clear, it’s not…
Gleam is a Type-Safe programming language that transpiles to Erlang And javascript . , so you can run its code on the BEAM. I’ve slept on Gleam for a while because its syntax. It was too much Rust and not enough Elixir for me.
From JavaScript to Rust, three years in.
