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

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3541

Jim Hugunin leaves Microsoft and IronPython

Today marks the end of a crazy six year journey for me at Microsoft. I clearly remember my brutal first 8 months at this company as I worked with lawyers, marketing folks and execs to figure out if and how we could release IronPython as an open source project from Microsoft. The final approval for that release came…

3544

The Python IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions

A question is infrequently answered either because few people know the answer or because it concerns an obscure, subtle point (but a point that may be crucial to you). I thought I had invented the term for my Java IAQ , but it also shows up at the very informative About.com Urban Legends site. There are lots of Python…

3546

The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)

[This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he…

3550

Clojure.rb

Call me crazy, but it seems that there is a large influx of Ruby programmers exploring the Clojure programming language. Based on the results of Chas Emerick’s great State of Clojure - Summer 2010 survey , 17% of surveyed Clojure users come from a Ruby background. Based on observed trends, I expect that percentage to…

3551

Ruby 2.0 Refinements in Practice

First Shugo announced them at RubyKaigi. Then Matz showed some improved syntax at RubyConf. But what are refinements [http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4085] all about, and what would they be used for? The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby

3553

Scooping the Loop Snooper (2000)

No general procedure for bug checks will do. Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you. I will prove that although you might work till you drop, you cannot tell if computation will stop. For imagine we have a procedure called P that for specified input permits you to see whether specified source code, with…

3554

The Future of Compiler Optimization

Hello, My name is Nadav and I am a PhD candidate, researching compilers for embedded systems and high-level synthesis. This is an excellent post and I enjoyed reading it. I have a few comments. 1. I agree about verification and optimization joining forces. We already see it to some extent with compiler warnings. 2…

3559

IronRuby Manager Leaves Microsoft

Though Frank Sinatra says it best , “I’m leaving today” isn’t exactly accurate; my last day as a Microsoft employee was July 23rd, 2010. This post is almost two weeks delayed as Felicia and I have been on the road since the 26th, driving cross-country to the east coast; we also decided to leave Seattle in favor of New…

3560

JQuery is a monad

It’s said that every Haskell programmer writes their own monad tutorial, and with good reason: once you finally understand the definition and capabilities of a monad, you’ll be eager to…

3561

A micro-manual for Lisp implemented in C

Recently I had to go through some code that uses the uIP TCP/IP stack, which reminded me, it has been a long time since I did something in C so I ended up spending the weekend implementing the 10 rules John McCarthy described in his paper A Micro-Manual for Lisp - not the whole Truth .

3569

Do C compilers disprove Fermat's Last Theorem?

(You probably already have realized this.) The reason the compiler produced code that terminated was based upon the fact that the values being altered (i.e., a, b and c) within the “while” loop are never referenced again after the loop. But, once you added code which printed the resulting values it was forced to…