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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.
In my previous post I outlined several cases that we would like to improve with Rust’s current borrow checker. This post discusses one possible scheme for solving those. The heart of the post is two key ideas:
A common perspective is that types are restrictions . Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making…
Technical articles by Kevin Menard. Topics include Ruby, Java, machine learning, and general computing.
A book review of my journey through dependent typing.
Ruby can work asynchronously with just a Fiber Scheduler and a couple built-in methods - no frameworks are required! It's easy to use, scales well, and has amazing performance benefits.
Being a self-described programming-language programming language is an ambitious goal. To preserve predictability while permitting linguistic extension, Racket comes equipped with a module system carefully designed to accommodate composable and compilable macros . One of the module system’s foundational properties is…
Programming language features are never orthogonal.
Traditionally C++ has been seen by many (and you know who you are) as just plain bad: the code is unreadably verbose, error messages are und...
A look at how Java 17 stacks up against Kotlin and Scala for development teams in 2021, and an overview of popular JVM technologies.
std::flip is a little-known utility from the C++ standard library header <functional>: it is a higher-order function that accepts a Callable and returns an equivalent Callable with the order of its parameters reversed (or “flipped”).
C++ seems to finally converge with their contracts proposal, I decided to give it a try and come up with ideas how such a thing would look for C. This is in early stages, not a full proposal yet, a…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring dict() over {} in new Python code. They argued that dict() is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any…
(Discussion on HackerNews)
This is shorter than some of my other posts, but I keep seeing people doing this wrong. It's even worse now in the LLM era.
Summary: Last year I made a list of four flaws with Haskell. Most have improved significantly over the last year. No language/compiler ecosy...
Crystal is a compiled programming langauge with static type-checking with syntax very similar to the Ruby programming language . Something that keeps Crystal feeling like a dynamically typed language is how a variable can be assigned to multiple types throughout the course of its lifetime, unlike most statically typed…
DSLs, or domain specific languages, are programming languages that are designed to implement a set of features specific to a particular problem or field. An example could be Make , the build tool, which is a specially designed language for combining ...
Veja o post original em português em How does find by example work in the Pharo Finder. How does find by example work in the Pharo Finder One of the things that looks like magic is the search for m…
With a little effort, you can make your mypy-typed Python go zoom.
Laziness is often useful. It allows you to express “infinite” computations, and only pay for as much of the computation as you need.
