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Go is still not good
Previous posts Why Go is not my favourite language and Go programs are not portable have me critiquing Go for over a decade.
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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Parse, Don’t Validate
Historically, I’ve struggled to find a concise, simple way to explain what it means to practice type-driven design. Too often, when someone asks me “How did you come up with this approach?” I find I can’t give them a satisfying answer. I know it didn’t just come to me in a vision—I have an iterative design process…
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Go: What we got right, what we got wrong
This is my closing talk ( video ) from the GopherConAU conference in Sydney, given November 10, 2023, the 14th anniversary of Go being lau...
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The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]
This science fiction / comedy / completely serious talk traces the history of JavaScript, and programming in general, from 1995 until 2035. It's not pro- or anti-JavaScript; the language's flaws are discussed frankly, but its ultimate impact on the industry is tremendously positive. For Gary's more serious (and less…
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Python’s new t-strings
Dave Peck's home on the web. Dave is an independent software developer, investor, and civic technologist.
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Why I wrote the BEAM book
The story behind writing The BEAM Book-ten years, three publishers, and an open‑source sprint.
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Rust After the Honeymoon
Two years ago, I had a blog entry describing falling in love with Rust . Of course, a relationship with a technology is like any other relationship: as novelty and infatuation wears off, it can get on a longer term (and often more realistic and subdued) footing – or it can begin to fray. So well one might ask: how is…
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Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter
A deep dive into the performance of Python 3.14's tail-call interpreter: How the performance results were confounded by an LLVM regression, the surprising complexity of compiling interpreter loops, and some reflections on performance work, software engineering, and optimizing compilers.
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My Thoughts on Oracle v Google
As you've probably heard by now, Oracle has decided to file suit against Google, claiming multiple counts of infringement against Java or JVM patents and copyrights they acquired when they assimilated Sun Microsystems this past year. Since I'm unlikely to keep my mouth shut about even trivial matters, something this…
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Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work
This is old! When I wrote it, I was a very different person.As it turns out, growing up a bit made me care a lot less about the nuances of Rust programming.
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Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them
This article has been translated into Spanish: Por qué debes aprender más lenguajes de programación (incluso si no los vas a utilizar)
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Maybe you don't need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS
Few weeks ago I noticed a blog post "Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly" making rounds on Twitter - talking about performance benefits of replacing plain JavaScript in the core of source-map library with a Rust version compiled to WebAssembly.
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Tricks I wish I knew when I learned TypeScript
TypeScript is a big Superset of JavaScript which has many features which might not be shown in every beginner tutorial. This post has three of them to make your life easier learning TypeScript.
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Modern C, Second Edition
A new edition of the book Modern C and much more are now available under a CC license via the following page This edition is the result of a collaboration with Manning, and improves a lot over the…
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Learning to Read X86 Assembly Language
Writing assembly language is something best left for the experts. To write code that runs directly on your microprocessor you need to know how memory segmentation works, what the intended use of each register is, how codes executes in real and protected modes and much, much more. And, of course, modern compilers will…
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'New' Python modules of 2015
As I’ve been blogging a lot more about Python over the last year, I thought I’d list a few of my favourite ‘new’ Python modules from 2015. These aren’t necessarily modules that were newly released in 2015, but modules that were ‘new to me’ this year – and may be new to you too!
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Eve Version 0
Today marks a huge milestone for us - the first public release of Eve . After a ton of research , dozens of prototypes, and a slew of tests we’ve finally come to something that we think is the beginning of Eve. It’s still in its infancy with lots missing and assuredly more than a few bugs, but it’s reached a point…
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Rust: A Critical Retrospective
Since I was unable to travel for a couple of years during the pandemic, I decided to take my new-found time and really lean into Rust. After writing over 100k lines of Rust code, I think I am starting to get a feel for the language and like every cranky engineer I have developed opinions and because this is the…
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Ten Years of Erlang
For my ten years in the Erlang community, I decided to cover a few topics such as hype phases and how this related to Erlang, the ladder of ideas within the language and how that can impact adoption, what changed in my decade there, and what I think Erlang still has to bring to the programming community at large.
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Why is Zig so cool?
I can’t think of any other language in my 45 years long career that surprised more than Zig . I can easily say that Zig is not only a new programming language, but it’s a totally new way to write programs, in my opinion. To say it’s merely a language to replace C or C++, it’s a huge understatement.
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About Python 3
Python community, friends, fellow developers, we need to talk. On December 3rd, 2008 Python 3.0 was first released. At the time it was widely said that Python 3 adoption was going to be a long process, it was referred to as a five year process. We’ve just passed the five year mark.
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My personal C coding style as of late 2023
This has been a ground-breaking year for my C skills, and paradigm shifts in my technique has provoked me to reconsider my habits and coding style. It’s been my largest personal style change in years, so I’ve decided to take a snapshot of its current state and my reasoning. These changes have produced significant…
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قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic
قلب is a programming language exploring the role of human culture in coding. Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. It is implemented as a tree-walking language interpreter in JavaScript.
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The two factions of C++
The dream of a single dialect-free C++ has probably been dead for many years, anyway.
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Why does calloc exist?
[Edit: Welcome Hacker News readers! Before we dive into the neat memory management esoterica, I want to briefly note that as engineers we have an ethical obligation in our work to consider the "safety, health, and welfare of the public" , because if we don't, terrible things happen . This is a challenging…
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An Intuition for Lisp Syntax
Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets ! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany.
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I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language
In which ChatGPT and I invent a fictional language spoken by slime-people