Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,636 posts.
I made a programming language with M&Ms
I built a tiny programming language where programs are candy grids, complete with a renderer, photo decoder, AST tree, and execution trace.
Nim versions 1.4.4 and 1.2.10
The Nim team is happy to announce the double patch release of versions 1.2.10 and 1.4.4.
Flight Recorder becomes part of OpenJDK
Provide a low-overhead data collection framework for troubleshooting Java applications and the HotSpot JVM.
Memories: Edinburgh ML to Standard ML
Dave MacQueen (with Robert Harper and John Reppy) has written a 100-page History of Standard ML . Here I offer my brief, personal and utterly subjective impressions of its early days, up to the deeply unfortunate schism that created what was then called Caml . Standard ML was a tragic missed opportunity. But even…
Learning Elixir: My side-project
I believe that to really learn a programming language, I have to get involved in a project. Getting an overview of the Elixir language was…
Homotopy Type Theory and Higher Inductive Types
In this article, we explore the possibilities allowed by higher inductive types. They enable a much more intuitive formalization of integers and new mind-blowing definitions of the (homotopical) ci…
Racket News – Issue 7
Mest spelade casinospel 2026 Spel & Recensioner December 24, 2025 | No Comments Svenska spelbolag säger nej till brittiskt inspirerad differentierad skatt Nyheter December 16, 2025 | No Comments Fullständig recension av spelet Aviator: hur fungerar detta virala crash game? Spel & Recensioner December 14, 2025 | No…
Logic Programming is Underrated
Mark Engelberg wrote a very interesting post titled Logic Programming is Overrated . I take issue with a quite a few points made in that post and I would like to address a couple of them here.
Functional Imperative Programming with Elixir (2018)
Stuff about things
Stack Overflow Users Rejoice as Pattern Matching Is Added to Python
Our on-the-ground reporter gauges developer reactions to the Python Steering Council's latest decision regarding pattern matching.
Programming as interaction: A new perspective for programming language research
In programming research, we say a lot about programs and languages, but very little about the actual process of programming. One simple trick that will make programming language research significantly more interesting is to think about programs not as expressions, but as a result of a sequence of interactions that…
Counting Clojure Code
For better or worse, we count lines of code. We (hopefully) feel a little dirty when we do it, because it's a flawed metric. But we do it . We do it on large codebases and small code snippets . Even badass hacker David Nolen does it .
Erlang: A Generalized TCP Server
In my last few articles about Erlang we've covered the basics of network programming with gen_tcp and Erlang/OTP's gen_server, or generic server, module. Let's combine the two.
Rust Is Eating JavaScript (2023)
Why is Rust being used to replace parts of the JavaScript web ecosystem like minification (Terser), transpilation (Babel), formatting (Prettier), bundling (webpack), linting (ESLint), and more?
The Python Paradox is now the Scala Paradox
Paul Graham has written a bunch of good essays on entrepreneurship, laying down much of the philosophy behind Y Combinator . If you’ve not read any of them yet, you should go and read them now – they contain lots of wisdom.
Friendship ended with the garbage collector
It's been a while since the last update about my work on the Inko programming language . Not because there hasn't been any progress, but because I've been busy making changes. A lot of changes.
Comparing C and C++ usage and performance with a real world project
The relative performance of C and C++ is the stuff of folk legends and Very Strong Opinions. There are microbenchmarks that can prove differ...
G# – A modern .NET language with Go, Kotlin, and Swift ergonomics
Meet G#: expressive data types, explicit nullability, and structured concurrency on .NET. Explore real examples and run your first project.
A case against currying
Curried functions are probably one of the first new things you come across if you go from an imperative language to a functional language. In purely functional languages, the convention is to define an n-parameter function inductively by staggering the parameters: applying the function to argument #1 returns a…
Deconstructing "K&R C"
Learn C The Hard Way (LCTHW) is a practical book teaching real world useful C using the same proven Learn The Hard Way method. LCTHW teaches real robust C coding and defensive programming tactics on real hardware rather than abstract machines and pedantic theory. The book emphasizes breaking your code on purpose, and…
The C++ Killers (Not You, Rust)
All the “C++ killers”, even these which I wholeheartedly love and respect like Rust, Julia, and D, help you write more features with fewer bugs, but they don't much help when you need to squeeze the very last FLOPS from the hardware you rent. As such, they don’t have a competitive advantage over C++. Or, for that…
Functional Programming in Go with Generics
Functional programming is an increasing popular programming paradigm with many languages building or already supporting it. Go already supports some of these features such as first-class and higher order functions and enabling functional programming.
Why Ada isn't Popular (1998)
Rick Thorne writes: > In truth, I like Ada too. I'm a former Ada man myself, as I believe I > mentioned. There are great things about the language, and since we're all > aware of them there's no point in going into them. I also prefer Beta to > VHS. Mathew Heaney responds: This is actually a specious comparison…
PHP 8.3
PHP 8.3 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features, such as explicit typing of class constants, deep-cloning of readonly properties and additions to the randomness functionality. As always it also includes performance improvements, bug fixes, and general cleanup.
The chronic suffering of the VB.NET community
I’d originally planned to write on this particular topic in response to increasing outreach to me personally, through my blog and other places, unsolicited, and independently from multiple communit…
Things I Enjoy in Rust: Error Handling
Things I enjoy in Rust: