Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,547 posts.
May 2002 "We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec In the software business there is an ongoing struggle between the pointy-headed academics, and another equally formidable force, the pointy-haired bosses. Everyone knows who…
Google’s Chris DiBona emailed me this morning to tell me that unless I removed a specific line from the license of my jsmin-php project (a PHP port of Douglas Crockford’s JSMin ), Google Code would no longer host the project.
Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and …
The first three newsgroups created inside Netscape (then Mosaic Communications ), when our news server went online the first time, were mcom.general, mcom.humour, and mcom.bad-attitude.
These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of…
The typestate pattern is an API design pattern that encodes information about an object’s run-time state in its compile-time type . In particular, an API using the typestate pattern will have:
1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary , usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the…
Effective Emacs Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ 10 Specific Ways to Improve Your Productivity With Emacs Emacs is the world's best text editor. It's not just the best for editing program source; it's the best for any kind of text-editing. Mastering Emacs will make you more effective at writing and
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
(This article has been translated into Spanish (PDF, with some additions) by Jorge Amado Soria Ramirez — thanks!) Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us
FOUT is what I’m calling the flash of unstyled text that you get while using @font-face in Firefox and Opera.
Type safety for numerics
Raise your hand if you know how to validate an email address. For those of you with your hand in the air, put it down quickly before someone sees you. It’s an odd sight to see someone sitting alone at the keyboard raising his or her hand. I was speaking metaphorically.
Remember that Stack Overflow thing we’ve been working on? Some commenters on a recent Hacker News article questioned the pricing of Stack Exchange – essentially, a hosted Stack Overflow: Seems really pricey for a relatively simple software like this. Someone write an open source alternative? it looks like something…
I recently posted an entry in my Python History blog on the origins of Python's functional features . A side remark about not supporting ta...
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…
[LinkedIn discussion, Twitter thread]
Five years ago I wrote Classical Inheritance in JavaScript ( Chinese Italian Japanese ) . It showed that JavaScript is a class-free, prototypal language, and that it has sufficient expressive power to simulate a classical system. My programming style has evolved since then, as any good programmer's should. I have…
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
In this series I will detail what I found out empirically about how mochiweb performs with lots of open connections, and show how to build a comet application using mochiweb, where each mochiweb connection is registered with a router which dispatches messages to various users. We end up with a working application that…
On occasion you meet a developer who seems like a solid programmer. They know their theory, they know their language. They can have a reasonable conversation about programming. But once it comes do…
This page is a slice of the history of concurrent programming, focusing on one particular lineage of Hoare's language of communicating sequential processes (CSP) [1] [1a] . Concurrent programming in this style is interesting for reasons not of efficiency but of clarity. That is, it is a widespread mistake to think…
Last substantive modification 1996-04-10 or earlier; Kragen link updated 2016-11-30
I know Vim better than most. Vim was my first real text editor.[1] I used it for years. I helped write the Floobits plugin for Vim. I’ve delved into Vim’s source code to figure out its workings. I e…
This talk is about using simple values (as opposed to complex objects) not just for holding data, but also as the boundaries between components and subsystems. It moves through many topics: functional programming; mutability's relationship to OO; isolated unit testing with and without test doubles; and concurrency, to…
Tour de Babel Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ This is my whirlwind languages tour — the one I was going to write for the Amazon Developers Journal this month, but couldn't find a way to do it that was... presentable. For one thing, I lapse occasionally into coarseness and profanity here, so it
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…
