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Final Words on Tail Calls
A lot of people remarked that in my post on Tail Recursion Elimination I confused tail self-recursion with other tail calls, which proper T...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,638 posts.
5582
Why free monads matter
A tour of free monads and their motivating use cases
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Revenge of the Nerds
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…
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GC support in Rust: API design
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 …
5585
The Typestate Pattern in Rust
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:
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PEP 3131 – Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers
This PEP suggests to support non-ASCII letters (such as accented characters, Cyrillic, Greek, Kanji, etc.) in Python identifiers.
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PHP: a fractal of bad design
(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
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PEP 636 – Structural Pattern Matching: Tutorial
This PEP is a tutorial for the pattern matching introduced by PEP 634.
5589
Clojure - Getting Started
Clojure is a dynamic development environment where you interact with your program while you write it, growing and adding to it while it’s running. To work with Clojure you need an editor that supports evaluation in source files and structural editing (working with nested forms in addition to character editing).
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Tail Recursion Elimination
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...
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The context sensitivity of C's grammar
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…
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PEP 3113 – Removal of Tuple Parameter Unpacking
Tuple parameter unpacking is the use of a tuple as a parameter in a function signature so as to have a sequence argument automatically unpacked. An example is:
5594
John Resig - Simple JavaScript Inheritance
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…
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Clojure - spec Guide
The spec library ( API docs ) specifies the structure of data, validates or conforms it, and can generate data based on the spec.
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0.4.1: Introducing Parse
One of the greatest feature of the Rebol language has always been its parsing engine, simply called Parse. It is an amazing piece of des...
5598
Boolean Blindness
I hate Booleans! But isn’t everything “just bits”? Aren’t computers built from gates? And aren’t gates just the logical connectives? How can a Computer Scientist p…
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Five Questions about Language Design
(These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.) 1. Programming Languages Are for People. Programming languages are how people talk to computers. The computer would be just as happy speaking any language that was unambiguous. The reason we have high level…
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Representing Code
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
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Revisiting a 'smaller Rust'
A bit over a year ago, I wrote some notes on a “smaller Rust” - a higher level language that would take inspiration from some of Rust’s type system innovations, but would be simpler by virtue of targeting a domain with less stringent requirements for user control and performance. During my time of unemployment this…
5602
PEP 289 – Generator Expressions
This PEP introduces generator expressions as a high performance, memory efficient generalization of list comprehensions PEP 202 and generators PEP 255.
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Using Pointers in SPARK
In this blog post, I will present one of the most interesting additions to the community 2019 version of SPARK: pointer support. One of the core…
5604
Urbit: functional programming from scratch
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
5605
Error handling and Go
An introduction to Go errors.
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C11 and C17 Standard Support Arriving in MSVC
Please see our Visual Studio 2019 version 16.8 Preview 3 release notes for more of our latest features. Update: Windows 10 SDK version 2104 has been
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You Could Have Invented Monads! (And Maybe You Already Have.)
A more permanent version of this article is stored at GitHub . Please link to that rather than to here. If you hadn't guessed, this is about...
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PEP 557 – Data Classes
This PEP describes an addition to the standard library called Data Classes. Although they use a very different mechanism, Data Classes can be thought of as “mutable namedtuples with defaults”. Because Data Classes use normal class definition syntax, y...
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PEP 394 – The “python” Command on Unix-Like Systems
This PEP outlines the behavior of Python scripts when the python command is invoked. Depending on a distribution or system configuration, python may or may not be installed. If python is installed its target interpreter may refer to python2 or python3. ...