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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.

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3301

An Introduction to Condition Handling for Non-Lispers

One of Common Lisp’s more advanced features is its condition handling system, which is a powerful generalisation of other languages’ exception handling systems. I first became aware of condition handling from Peter Seibel’s Practical Common Lisp , chapter 19 . But if I’m honest I’ve only very recently understood what…

3305

Ruby might be faster than you think

I saw a project a couple weeks back which allows writing and running Crystal methods inline inside a Ruby file. It’s a neat project, and I don’t want to take away from it but something in the README example looked off to me. require 'crystalruby' require 'benchmark' module Fibonnaci crystalize [n:

3307

Redefining Go Functions

I once wrote a Perl subroutine that would memoize the subroutine that called it. That much was useful, but then it inserted a copy of itself into the caller, so that its callers would be memoized too. A well-placed call to aggressively_memoize could back-propagate to the whole codebase, spreading functional purity…

3308

C Programming Puzzlers

These questions originally appeared as an article on programmersheaven.com , written by Ashok K. Pathak, a researcher at Bharat Electronics Limited (CRL), Ghaziabad. They are reproduced here with minor modifications.

3309

Lil: A Scripting Language

Lil is part of the technology that powers Decker , a multimedia creative tool inspired by HyperCard . Decker uses Lil for adding custom behavior to decks and the widgets within. Lil is designed to be learned in layers, but it is a richly multi-paradigm language which incorporates ideas from imperative, functional…

3312

Trivia About Rust Types

Preface (by Jimmy Hartzell) I am a huge fan of Jon Gjengset’s Rust for Rustaceans, an excellent book to bridge the gap between beginner Rust programming skills and becoming a fully-functional member of the Rust community. He’s famous for his YouTube channel as well; I’ve heard good things about it (watching video…

3313

Modern C++ for C Programmers

2018 is an exciting time to be a programmer, with so many good “full service” programming languages to choose from: C, C++ 2017, Go, Python, Rust and who knows Swift too. Programming languages are complicated beasts - even the simplest languages have specifications that run (or would run) in the hundreds of pages, and…

3318

The theory of concatenative combinators (2007)

This article attempts to outline, in informal terms, a new theory of combinators, related to the theory of Combinatory Logic pioneered by Moses Schonfinkel, Haskell Curry, and others in the 1930s. Although not essential, an understanding of the classical theory of combinators may be helpful (see the links at the…

3323

Move semantics in Rust, C++, and Hylo

I just finished reading the paper Borrow checking Hylo . It outlines the basic design of Hylo . Hylo is an early-stage programming language, but unlike other contenders of C++, it provides memory safety like rust. Specifically it merges rust’s borrow checking ideas into the framework of moveable value semantics (MVS)…

3327

Notes on a Smaller Rust

Many people who use Rust for a bit - especially those who like the language but do not fall in love with it - feel a sense that there must be a smaller, simpler variation on the same theme which would maybe be a little less powerful, but would also be much easier to use. I agree with them, but I think they are almost…

3328

Falsehoods programmers believe about null pointers

Null pointers look simple on the surface, and that’s why they’re so dangerous. As compiler optimizations, intuitive but incorrect simplifications, and platform-specific quirks have piled on, the odds of making a wrong assumption have increased, leading to the proliferation of bugs and vulnerabilities. This article…