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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 238 posts.

2018
31

Why is Rust difficult?

Rust is considered difficult to learn by many people. Indeed, when I learned it, I considered it to be the hardest programming language up to that time I’ve met. And that says something, since I have a habit of learning whatever language I find interesting. Looking back, I’m not sure I was correct, C++ is probably…

38

Go hits the concurrency nail on the head

More than thirteen years have passed since Herb Sutter declared that the free lunch is over and concurrency is upon us , and yet it's hard to claim that most mainstream languages have made a strong shift towards concurrent modes of programming. We have to admit that concurrency is just hard , and the struggles of some…

44

Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C

A pointer references a location in memory and dereferencing a pointer refers to the lookup of the value of the memory location the pointer references. The value of a pointer is a memory address. The C standard does not define the representation of a memory address. This is crucial since not every architecture makes…

49

An opinionated guide to Haskell

For me, this month marks the end of an era in my life: as of February 2018, I am no longer employed writing Haskell. It’s been a fascinating two years, and while I am excitedly looking forward to what I’ll be doing next, it’s likely I will continue to write Haskell in my spare time. I’ll probably even write it again…

54

A Virtual Machine

Magicians protect their secrets not because the secrets are large and important, but because they are so small and trivial. The wonderful effects created on stage are often the result of a secret so absurd that the magician would be embarrassed to admit that that was how it was done.