Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.

Programming Languages
Any year
3015

Lisp: More is less

There’s recently been a resurgence of interest in Lisp (specifically, Clojure) in my neighborhood. I have some kind of a fondness for Lisp, but I think some of its characteristics make it poorly suited for use in large programming efforts. Indeed many of the unique properties that Lisp devotees (myself once included)…

3017

Sum Types Are Coming (2015)

Just as all mainstream languages now have lambda functions, I predict sum types are the next construct to spread outward from the typed functional programming community to the mainstream. Sum types are very useful, and after living with them in Haskell for a while, I miss them deeply when using languages without them…

3019

The myth of the Lisp genius

I'm fascinated by the myth of the Lisp genius, the eccentric programmer who accomplishes super-human feats writing Lisp. I'm not saying that such geniuses don't exist; they do. Here I'm using "myth" in the sense of a story with archetypical characters that fuels the imagination. I'm thinking myth in the sense of…

3023

The Value of Undefined Behavior

In several places, the C and C++ language specifications use a curious, and fairly controversial, phrase: undefined behavior . For certain program constructs, the specification prescribes no specific behavior, instead allowing anything to happen . Such constructs are considered erroneous, and so the result depends on…

3024

Object-oriented techniques in C

Although the techniques described below won't be very popular nowadays (after all, why bother using C if we're going to write object-oriented code?), they are still quite relevant for embedded systems and other low-level things (kernel development, etc). For example, lots of Linux Kernel subsystems use similar…