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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,707 posts.

Any year
362

Lisp Quickstart

George Mason University’s Department of Computer Science advances research and education in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, robotics, software engineering, and other computing fields. As part of Virginia’s largest public research university, the department connects researchers and students with government…

365

New in PHP 8

PHP 8.0 brings features like attributes, union types, and the JIT compiler. It has some important breaking changes, and improved performance.

368

PHP Sucks But I Like It

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It’s been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it’s rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it

370

The relative performance of C and Rust

My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…

371

Parsing: a timeline

In India, Panini creates an exact description of the Sanskrit language, including pronunciation. Sanskrit can be completely reconstructed using nothing but Panini's grammar. Panini's grammar, which predates Euclid, is probably the first formal system of any kind. In the future, nothing like it will exist for any other…

372

Why I program in Erlang (2012)

Erlang is a twenty-five-year-old programming language that has yet to win a popularity contest, and almost certainly will never win any medals for speed, let alone any tiaras for syntactic beauty. The language is slow, awkward, and ugly. Refactoring Erlang code is a pain.

381

How to Use Go Interfaces

I occasionally give free Go consults and code review on top of my daily work. As such, I tend to read a lot of other peoples’ codes. And while this is really more of a feeling *Now, you should go, really? You're a statistician by training ffs, I’ve seen an increase in what I call “Java-style” interface usage. This…

384

Why Lisp?

A number of people have contacted me about a comment I wrote yesterday on Hacker News asking me to elaborate, e.g.: my impression is that...

386

Memory-efficient enum arrays in Zig

Proper support for sum types or tagged unions have become table stakes for systems programming languages. However, they can incur a lot of memory fragmentation that's not trivial to avoid without good support for metaprogramming. This post goes into Zig's powerful comptime feature, and how it allows some radical…