Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.
The Y Combinator in Arc and Java
I was recently reading The Little Schemer , a very intersting book about how to think in Scheme. The book uses a unique question-response ...
The Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely Must Know About Unicode (2003)
Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you’re supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? Did you ever get an email from your friends in…
Where Lisp Fails: at Turning People into Fungible Cogs
A favorite conundrum of many Lisp aficionados is why the language appears to languish in disuse. Talk of cultural problems , "the library question" (which usually boils down to nonsensical circular reasoning), too many parentheses, and other absurdities simply dances around the blindingly obvious explanation - one…
Visualization of the Grammars of Ruby, Java and Javascript
As part of the momentum surrounding the Ruby implementer’s summit , I have decided to take on a pet project to understand Ruby’s grammar better, with the goal of contributing to an implementation-independent specification of the grammar. Matz mentioned during his keynote how parse.y was one of the uglier parts of Ruby…
Clojure N00b Tips from Tim Bray
Clojure is the new hotness among people who think the JVM is an interesting platform for post-Java languages, and for people who think there’s still life in that ol’ Lisp beast, and for people who worry about concurrency and state in the context of the multicore future. Over the last few days I’ve been severely…
Why Python Programmers Should Learn Python
A Word Aligned article posted 2007-07-01, tagged Python, Java, Puzzles.
Ruby's not ready
A controversial evaluation of the programming language Ruby, version 1.8.
Dynamic languages are static languages
While reviewing some of the comments on my post about parallelism and concurrency, I noticed that the great fallacy about dynamic and static languages continues to hold people in its thrall. So, i…
"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out"
These are questions that people ask me often. If you have better questions or comments on the answers, feel free to email me. Please remember that I can't spend all of my time improving my homepages.
Lisper's take on Arc
The nerdosphere is abuzz about Arc , Paul Graham's long-awaited new dialect of Lisp, so I figured I might as well pile on. For the benef...
Idiomatic Clojure
I’m starting to wind down my Clojure research, but I’m feeling a little guilty about having exposed people to my klunky Lisp-newbie code, perhaps giving a false impression of how the language feels. So I’d like to show you what it looks like when it’s created by someone who’s actually part of the tribe and thinks in…
Someday we will all program in Python
I can write a program in Java about twice as fast as as I can write the same program C or C++, and I can bang out the same program in Python maybe twice again as fast as I can in Java. In Python, you just get straight to the point and say what you mean by saying things like:
Python vs Ruby, slightly more in-depth
Disclaimers Edit (2009/08/04): It is not obvious for many readers that this blog and its articles are meant as opinion piece. It is also not obvious that I like both languages. Just to be clear, I …
Condition Handling in the Lisp Language Family (2001)
This paper appears in Advances in Exception Handling Techniques , edited by A. Romanovsky, C. Dony, J.L. Knudsen, and A. Tripathi. This book, published in 2001, is part of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2022 , published by Springer .