Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,636 posts.

Programming Languages
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3842

Was BASIC that horrible or better?

Everything was fine until BASIC entered the picture. Edsger Dijkstra in a hallucination of 2023’s AI Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally…

3854

Types Are The Truth

In Chapter 9 of Types and Programming Languages , Pierce presents his exposition of the Simply typed Lambda-Calculus. It is a truly awesome chapter - each subsection in succession constructs a rich and very well detailed system of computation and Pierce is a master of precision, guiding the reader through the maze of…

3862

How to read Haskell like Python

Have you ever been in the situation where you need to quickly understand what a piece of code in some unfamiliar language does? If the language looks a lot like what you’re comfortable with, you can usually guess what large amounts of the code does; even if you may not be completely familiar how all the language…