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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 1,929 posts.

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1681

Generalizing Support for Functional OOP in R

R has built-in support for two functional Object Oriented Programming (OOP) systems: S3 and S4, corresponding to the third and fourth version of the S language, respectively. The two systems are largely compatible; however, they are two fundamentally distinct systems, two systems for a user to understand, two systems…

1687

NimConf 2026: Dates Announced, Registrations Open

The Nim Team is happy to announce the next instalment of NimConf! NimConf 2026 will happen June 20, 2026 in the traditional online format where the talks are pre-recorded and revealed as premiers on YouTube while the viewers can ask questions and the presenter can answer them in the live chat.

1691

Algebraic effects, ownership, and borrowing

Algebraic Effects are a useful abstraction for reasoning about effectful programs by letting us leave the interpretation of these effects to callers. However, most existing literature discusses these in the context of a pure functional language with pervasive sharing of values. What restrictions would we need to…

1693

Tuning Ruby's Global Method Cache

I was recently profiling a production Shopify application server using perf and noticed a fair amount of time being spent in a particular function, st_lookup, which is used by Ruby’s MRI implementation for hash table lookups: Hash tables are used all over MRI, and not just for the Hash object; global variables…

1701

Node v4.1.0

Node.js® is a free, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that lets developers create servers, web apps, command line tools and scripts.

1705

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…

1706

Common Lisp – Myths and Legends (2002)

Lisp has been supporting the world's most complex applications since 1958. And Lisp has grown a lot since then. So if you or someone you know harbors fears or concerns about Lisp because of something learned in a class or muttered by a friend 20 or 30 years ago, it's time to take a fresh look. In this paper we're…