The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 384 posts.
An article titled Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming came out today and it's getting a lot of attention. I have a feeling that it's viewed in a wrong context, so I'd like to comment on the issue raised there.
When you use Rust, it is sometimes outright preposterous how much knowledge of language, and how much of programming ingenuity and curiosity you need in order to accomplish the most trivial things. When you feel particularly desperate, you go to rust/issues and search for a solution for your problem. Suddenly, you…
This page examines the earliest surviving Lisp compiler, written by Timothy Hart and Michael Levin around 1961. To avoid repetition of phrases like “the compiler”, we will use the abbreviation “ HLC ” (for “Hart–Levin Compiler”) to refer to it. The HLC was introduced in M.I.T. AIM -039 and documented more fully in the…
C++11 has been around for around 11 years and C++14 for 8. From my experience, I see that even today, many companies struggle to use those standards in production in the most efficient way. As always, with new stuff came benefits, risks, and increased learning effort. Fortunately, with a new book written by top C++…
Like many hackers, my first real programming language love was Lisp. Paul Graham, who inspired my own explorations of the language, is a particular advocate and has written quite a bit about Lisp a…
Today I tried to help a friend who is a great computer scientist, but not a JS person use a JS module he found on Github. Since for the past 6 years my day job is doing usability research & teaching at MIT, I couldn’t help but cringe at the slog that this was. Lo and behold, a pile of unnecessary error conditions…
With Perl 5.36.0 just around the corner, we thought that this is a good time to clarify plans for the future of the Perl programming language. We realised that the future was hammered out in a number of steps, across several months. This meant that there hasn't been a single statement we could refer people to. This…
Everyone who knows me IRL (and, I suppose, who follows me online for long enough), knows that I have a… special relationship with LaTeX. I think it has something to do with its obscurity, when it wasn’t specifically made to be obtuse, and then being so good at what it does — which is typeset documents. It doesn’t help…
I don't really have much experience with microcontrollers. I've played around with some arduinos before and the main entry point for my home network is a Raspberry Pi, but that's about it for recent experience. I did take a single course on microcontrollers a few years back though. I am fascinated by them - they're…
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
C# 11 features are coming along nicely and the most recent release features all sorts of goodies including updates to string literals, pattern matching, checked user-defined operators, and an update on !!.
Veja o post original em português em How does find by example work in the Pharo Finder. How does find by example work in the Pharo Finder One of the things that looks like magic is the search for m…
A book review of my journey through dependent typing.
... in which we look at one or two ways to make life easier when working with Python regular expressions.
Since I was unable to travel for a couple of years during the pandemic, I decided to take my new-found time and really lean into Rust. After writing over 100k lines of Rust code, I think I am starting to get a feel for the language and like every cranky engineer I have developed opinions and because this is the…
.NET 7 Preview 3 is now available with enhancements to observability, startup times, codegen, GC regions, native AOT compilation, and more.
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
Shopify is investing on Ruby on Rails at scale by funding high-profile academics to focus their work towards Ruby and the needs of the Ruby community.
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
My coding time this year has been invested in Quamina , an event-filtering library implemented in Go. Just in the last couple of weeks I spotted an opportunity to bring Go’s shiny new generics to bear, and not just anywhere, but for a central data structure. I got good results, but the process was sort of painful; I…
Enhance the Java programming language with record patterns to deconstruct record values. Record patterns and type patterns can be nested to enable a powerful, declarative, and composable form of data navigation and processing. This is a preview language feature .
Virtual Threads are an excellent addition to Java platform and here's how Clojure is going to benefit from it.
Why and how I added proper CSV support to GoAWK, my POSIX-compatible AWK interpreter.
If you peruse the archives of language-summit blogs, you’ll find that one theme comes up again and again : the dream of Python without the GIL. Continuing this venerable tradition, Sam Gross kicked off the 2022 Language Summit by giving the attendees an update on nogil , a project that took the Python community by…
In this post, I want to give a nuanced perspective on our experience porting YJIT from C to Rust. I'll talk about the positives, but also discuss the things that we found challenging or suboptimal in our experience.
“ The Rise of Worse is Better ” is a famous essay in the software industry. It says that lazily-looking code that does not provide a consistent interface is sometimes actually better than neatly layered, consistent one. I think I've experienced this paradoxical situation, so I'd like to share that story.
Map your (least) favorite programming language to your favorite Planet Express crew member based on its characteristics.
