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Do you have a problem? Write a compiler
These are notes of the talk I gave at ClojuTre 2019 . There is a video recording of the talk , and the slide deck as a PDF .
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,707 posts.
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Lisp Quickstart
George Mason University’s Department of Computer Science advances research and education in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, software engineering, and other computing fields. As part of Virginia’s largest public research university, the department connects researchers and students with government…
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The Python I Would Like To See
What I would imagine an better Python would look like.
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New in PHP 8
PHP 8.0 brings features like attributes, union types, and the JIT compiler. It has some important breaking changes, and improved performance.
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What's bad about Julia?
A mega-rant about all the things I find bad about Julia.
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3.5 Years, 500k Lines of Go
January 31st 2017 was my last day at Canonical, after working for 3.5 years on what is one of the largest open source projects written in Go - Juju .
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PHP Sucks But I Like It
I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It’s been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it’s rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it
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Learning JavaScript - my experience and advice
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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The relative performance of C and Rust
My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…
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Parsing: a timeline
In India, Panini creates an exact description of the Sanskrit language, including pronunciation. Sanskrit can be completely reconstructed using nothing but Panini's grammar. Panini's grammar, which predates Euclid, is probably the first formal system of any kind. In the future, nothing like it will exist for any other…
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Why I program in Erlang (2012)
Erlang is a twenty-five-year-old programming language that has yet to win a popularity contest, and almost certainly will never win any medals for speed, let alone any tiaras for syntactic beauty. The language is slow, awkward, and ugly. Refactoring Erlang code is a pain.
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I have no constructor, and I must initialize
It has been three days. The room is cold and dark, but your screens are blinding. You feel disoriented as you come in and out of dissociative episodes. Now and again, you laugh, to no accompaniment. Why are you here? Was this your fault?
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Rust, an Anti-Sloppy Programming Language
Arthur’s thoughts on coding, software engineering, and other interesting things.
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Python can run Mojo now
Chris Lattner mentioned that Python can actually call Mojo code now. I love this idea (!) as I'm definitely in the market for a simple compiled language that can offer Python some really fast functions.
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Python's New Package Landscape
Everything you need to know today about Python Packaging: PEPs 517/518, pyproject.toml, Pipenv, setuptools, and—of course—pip.
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One base class to rule them all.
Last week, I released base , a universal Base class for Ruby. Inheriting from it gives your class every instance method, class method, and constant from every module and class in the system. In a Rails app, it results in:
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Python has had async for 10 years – why isn't it more popular?
A deep-dive into the challenges and misconceptions surrounding async programming in Python
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How to Use Go Interfaces
I occasionally give free Go consults and code review on top of my daily work. As such, I tend to read a lot of other peoples’ codes. And while this is really more of a feeling *Now, you should go, really? You're a statistician by training ffs, I’ve seen an increase in what I call “Java-style” interface usage. This…
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Two Weeks of Rust
Disclaimer: I'm digging Rust. I lost my hunger for programming from doing too many sad commercial projects. And now it's back. You rock, Rust!
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Why Lisp?
A number of people have contacted me about a comment I wrote yesterday on Hacker News asking me to elaborate, e.g.: my impression is that...
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Memory-efficient enum arrays in Zig
Proper support for sum types or tagged unions have become table stakes for systems programming languages. However, they can incur a lot of memory fragmentation that's not trivial to avoid without good support for metaprogramming. This post goes into Zig's powerful comptime feature, and how it allows some radical…
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Leaving Haskell behind
For almost a complete decade—starting with discovering Haskell in about 2009 and right up until switching to a job where I used primarily...
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Lua is so underrated
Introduction The more I learn about Lua's design and implementation, the more impressed I am. It's very rare to see software that does so much with so lit...
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Go: Ten years and climbing
Drawing Copyright ©2017 Renee French This week marks the 10th anniversary of the creation of Go. The initial discussion ...