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

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3307

Redefining Go Functions

I once wrote a Perl subroutine that would memoize the subroutine that called it. That much was useful, but then it inserted a copy of itself into the caller, so that its callers would be memoized too. A well-placed call to aggressively_memoize could back-propagate to the whole codebase, spreading functional purity…

3309

Lil: A Scripting Language

Lil is part of the technology that powers Decker , a multimedia creative tool inspired by HyperCard . Decker uses Lil for adding custom behavior to decks and the widgets within. Lil is designed to be learned in layers, but it is a richly multi-paradigm language which incorporates ideas from imperative, functional…

3312

Trivia About Rust Types

Preface (by Jimmy Hartzell) I am a huge fan of Jon Gjengset’s Rust for Rustaceans, an excellent book to bridge the gap between beginner Rust programming skills and becoming a fully-functional member of the Rust community. He’s famous for his YouTube channel as well; I’ve heard good things about it (watching video…

3313

Modern C++ for C Programmers

2018 is an exciting time to be a programmer, with so many good “full service” programming languages to choose from: C, C++ 2017, Go, Python, Rust and who knows Swift too. Programming languages are complicated beasts - even the simplest languages have specifications that run (or would run) in the hundreds of pages, and…

3327

Notes on a Smaller Rust

Many people who use Rust for a bit - especially those who like the language but do not fall in love with it - feel a sense that there must be a smaller, simpler variation on the same theme which would maybe be a little less powerful, but would also be much easier to use. I agree with them, but I think they are almost…