Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.
Context free grammars (CFGs) are a valuable theoretical tool on which the modern compilation theory relies for parsing the code of programming languages. For example, the most popular tool used for parsing – YACC , generates parsers for CFGs. What most people don’t know 1 is that the vast majority of programming…
I’ve been doing a lot of work, lately, with JavaScript inheritance – namely for my work-in-progress JavaScript book – and in doing so have examined a number of different JavaScript classical-inheritance-simulating techniques. Out of all the ones that I’ve looked at I think my favorites were the implementations…
I hate Booleans! But isn’t everything “just bits”? Aren’t computers built from gates? And aren’t gates just the logical connectives? How can a Computer Scientist p…
(These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.) 1. Programming Languages Are for People. Programming languages are how people talk to computers. The computer would be just as happy speaking any language that was unambiguous. The reason we have high level…
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
A bit over a year ago, I wrote some notes on a “smaller Rust” - a higher level language that would take inspiration from some of Rust’s type system innovations, but would be simpler by virtue of targeting a domain with less stringent requirements for user control and performance. During my time of unemployment this…
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
A more permanent version of this article is stored at GitHub . Please link to that rather than to here. If you hadn't guessed, this is about...
How to implement type classes in terms of term-level data structures
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Encoding business logic in types
What follows is the text of my presentation, Functional options for friendly APIs that I gave at dotGo this year. It has been edited slightly for readability.
I think the only serious gripe is what you call your biggest gripe, and I must say that I envy this in Haskell. As you know, in the eager world we tend to write out our own recursive functions, rather than use combinators. You give part of the reason; the other part is that deforestation and related transformations…
The official Go proposal is at https://golang.org/issue/24301 , filed on March 20, 2018 and accepted on May 21, 2018.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use cgo.” Now they have two problems.
