Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,708 posts.
I sometimes get asked for recommendations of what programming language to "learn next". It's great that folks appreciate the fact that being exposed to several sufficiently different programming languages is an important step on the path to programming enlightenment. But it's also true that, given limited free time…
To say my first foray into Rust was a frustrating struggle would be an understatement. I picked a terrible first project that left me neck deep in Rust’s trickiest areas right off the bat. I was excited to try again. A few years ago I wrote Sumoshell, a CLI App for log analysis. I’d wanted to improve it for a while…
Recently I've discovered a very interesting language / realization of the Lambda Calculus. I was unable to find any other language like it, which I find quite surprising. In hindsight, the language seems obvious and natural. And the language keeps surprising me. I say "discovered" in the same sense that Paul Graham…
How I wrote GoAWK, how I tested it, and how I measured and improved its performance.
Python is my favourite programming language. Since I discovered it in 2004, programming in Python became my favourite hobby. I've tried to l...
When the machines make machines, we're in a new world.
About a month ago I tweeted this: Thought: get the maintainers of a bunch of big Python libraries to sign something saying that they WILL drop Python 2.7 support in 2020.— Aaron Meurer (@asmeurer) Mar
An overview of all the tools, standards and special languages used in the automotive industry where the official language is actually C.
If I were more musically talented I would be writing a song ♫ Arguments that are destructured, and operator characters combine-ed; Loop binding changes and convert redefine-ed… ♫ no none of that, please stop.
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
The heart of Rust borrow-checking is this: when a borrow is taken, and until it expires, access to the borrowed place is restricted. For example you may not read from a place while it is mutably borrowed.
While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby's blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript's "first class functions". Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both…
Java is good by modern standards, from a technical perspective, the platform having received a lot of improvements from Java 8 to 17. Unfortunately, it still stinks, and the problem is its “enterprise” culture.
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.
Note: Everything that follows is purely my personal opinion as an individual. It should not be seen as any sort of policy of the Meson buil...
Making the Python interpreter faster
I recently took some time to try Gleam, the type-safe language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. For a couple of weeks, I used it to build a little feed aggregator. These are my notes.
If we go through the list of C++23 features, we can stumble upon the notion of garbage collection twice. Once among the language and once among the library features. Both entries refer to the same paper (P2186R2): garbage collection (GC in short) support is getting removed from C++. Just to make it clear, it’s not…
After a considerable gap, a gave Go another go! The Problem As part of a consulting engagement, I accepted a project to devel...
You go into work and discover that a coworker isn't happy with some code you wrote because they don't understand it. They go to your manager and tell them that you're being a problem by writing code they don't understand. Your manager, being very skilled in conflict resolution, makes a technical decision to avoid…
First of all, Go seems like a great language. It has an excellent tutorial which I joyfully went through and found: Go is Fast. Concurrent by design. Typed (important for JIT and IDE’s) but n…
Over the past year, I’ve been working on fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library. It is not a simple wrapper on top of libc; it doesn’t depend on libc except when required to by the platform. To my knowledge, there is nothing like it.
Epic Games released an initial public implementation of the Verse programming language. Verse has been designed by some people who really know what they’re doing:
[The wordpress markdown inclusion does a very bad job, it seems, there have been some idiotic formatting errors. I hope that these are fixed, now.] A years-long effort led by Kayvan Memarian and Pe…
Before we dive into the technical details, let’s start with a quick history lesson, courtesy of Don Syme who worked on adding generics to .NET and then went on to design and implement F#, which is a pretty impressive set of achievements!!
