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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 160 posts.

2016
130

Why OCaml? [video]

Here’s a post from a talk I gave this last summer during our internship program about why we use OCaml. It spends a lot of time on how OCaml fits into the space of programming language designs, and why we think OCaml is in a real sweet spot in that design space, especially for the kind of work we do at Jane Street.

136

C++17 and other future highlights of C++

Welcome to the 3rd and last part about current proposals for C++17 and beyond. In the last part, there was an overview on the current Technical Specifications, most likely to move into C++ after C++17 . The full proposal listing of 2016 sorted by subgroups contains many more proposals then I can cover.

140

A bit of background for the unified C++ call proposal

C++ provides two calling syntaxes, x.f(y) and f(x,y). This has bothered me for a long time. I discussed the problem in the context of multimethods in D&E in 1994, referring back to a proposal by Doug Lea from 1991, and again in 2007. Each of the syntaxes has its virtues, but they force design decisions on people…

149

Why Would Anyone Use Perl 6?

I mean, can you get it any more WRONG?! The juvenile logo and awful color scheme of the website. The Christmas release that isn't all release-like. Version 6.c? Why not 6.0? What's with the whole "language" and "compiler" distinctions no one cares about? Why is the first stable release of the compiler not optimized to…