Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.

Programming Languages
Any year
1863

A Taste of Haskell

In this post I want to highlight a few fun aspects of the Haskell programming language. The purpose is to give you a taste of Haskell so that you will want to learn more of it. Don’t consider this as a tutorial or guide but rather as a starting point, as it is based on a short talk I held at work, which in turn is…

1867

Trampolines in JavaScript

A trampoline is a loop that iteratively invokes thunk -returning functions ( continuation-passing style ). A single trampoline is sufficient to express all control transfers of a program; a program so expressed is trampolined, or in trampolined style; converting a program to trampolined style is trampolining…

1874

Lisp as an alternative to Java (2000)

It turns out my hopes were answered. First, Prechelt published another article that covers Tcl, Python, Perl, and Rexx. Also, Ron Garret (nee Erann Gat) did a follow-up study in which he asked programmers to write Prechelt's test program in Lisp. His results show that the resulting Lisp programs ran faster on average…

1878

Why Erlang?

The chance that you are reading this blog post on a device with a multicore cpu is increasing on a daily basis which is why everybody is talking about concurrency now. Concurrency for our web applications and API backends means that we’d like our htop to look like this:

1884

Callbacks are Pretty Okay

Among the many proposed solutions, one of them strikes me as particularly clean: "asynchronous wait" or "wait and defer". iced-coffee-script had this a while ago. Kal just debuted with an identical solution, only differing in syntax. Supposedly LiveScript supports this with "backcalls" .