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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,636 posts.

Programming Languages
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2258

Inventing Monads

I got into a discussion about monads recently. On a search to find some resources to share, I realized that most essays explained them with type signatures and rules. A missing ingredient to grok them, I think, is to understand the intuition behind them. How could you end up inventing monads?

2264

F (2006)

F is a pure functional concatenative language originally designed as an extension of False . F contains the list-operations of K3 and the dip combinator of Joy . Floating-point and symbolic datatypes are supported. One-time assignment is enforced in syntax. A theory of function-valence and -charge is outlined. F also…

2271

Kotlin 1.4

Today we’re releasing Kotlin 1.4.0! Over the past years, we’ve been working hard on making Kotlin a programming language that is fun, enjoyable, and productive to work with. To continue our pursuit of this goal with this version of Kotlin, we put a lot of energy and effort into improving the performance and quality of…

2275

J Notation as a Tool of Thought

Kenneth Iverson’s 1964 language, APL, won him the Turing Award. His award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought, argued that better notations would lead people to deeper insights about mathematics. He provided a number of examples ranging across linear algebra, arithmetic, probability, and logic. Unfortunately, most…