Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
Notable programmers describe understanding and coding in LISP as a semi-religious experience. What gives the language this power?
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,545 posts.
Notable programmers describe understanding and coding in LISP as a semi-religious experience. What gives the language this power?
As a developer, you develop instincts for judging quality of code. One of my favorite interview questions is: When you look at a project’s code for the first time, what are the things you look for?...
Create usable sites, even if JavaScript is blocked
Did you ever happen to disagree with a colleague on the single responsibility principle and its application? Let's try to understand why that could be the case.
Sorting Japanese is not only difficult—it’s an unsolved problem. This seems hard to believe if you are not familiar with the complexities of processing Japanese digitally. But what is trivially easy in English is impossible in Japanese, even with the amount of computer power we have available today.
More or less the title this time, but first, a story about SIMD. There are three levels of understanding how SIMD works (well, at least I am level 3 at the moment):
Just my website. Some Elixir, some Ruby, some more exotic languages and general thoughts on tech.
Teaching our five year old daughter to code by cheating.
This is the first article in a series dedicated to multiple dispatch - an advanced abstraction technique available to programmers out-of-the-box in some languages, and implementable in others. This first post in the series presents the technique and explains the problem it intends to solve. It uses C++ as the…
(This is the blog post version of my keynote from EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Czechia.) We now have a lock file format specification. That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it took 4 years of active work to get us that specification. Part education, part therapy,
Luca Pette's website
I build a lot of command-line tools in Python. It’s become my favorite way of quickly turning a piece of code into something I can use myself and package up …
are-dependent-types-actually-erased - Chad Nauseam Home
Most C++ programmers rely on "STL" for their data structures. The most popular data structure is probably vector, which is just a dynamic array. The set and the map are other useful ones. The STL data structures are a minimalist design. You have relatively few methods. All of them allow you to compute the size ……
In this post I’d like to test limits of python aiohttp and check its performance in terms of requests per minute. Everyone knows that asynchronous code perf...
Thoughts on what Redux requires, how Redux is intended to be used, and what is possible with Redux
C++26 brings us a small but meaningful cleanup to the language: deprecating ellipsis parameters without a preceding comma. This change, proposed in P3176R1, aims to improve C compatibility, reduce confusion, and pave the way for future language features. The proposal’s name is a playful reference to the Oxford comma …
I am mostly a backend developer, but every now and then I need to do some frontend work. Even if just for personal use.
New paper: “Security Analysis of Pseudo-Random Number Generators with Input: /dev/random is not Robust, by Yevgeniy Dodis, David Pointcheval, Sylvain Ruhault, Damien Vergnaud, and Daniel Wichs. Abstract: A pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) is a deterministic algorithm that produces numbers whose distribution is…
I’ve wondered Why Rails becomes slow with JIT for a long time. Today, I’m pleased to share my answer to the question in this article, which…
This article is about the Y combinator, a fixed-point combinator that provides a way of using recursion in scenarios and programming languages where symbols are not available. The concept of the Y combinator itself is closely related to lambda calculus (λ-calculus) and functional programming languages. More…
Tips on using React without JSX.