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

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63

Kotlin Is Better

I've also ended up using Emacs along side Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm & Webstorm). It is an odd combo but it works great. Emacs for mind-control level text editing, and the IDE works great for mouse-oriented poking around and small edits.

64

ClojureScript 1.7: ClojureScript can compile itself

I’ve been enamoured with languages in the Lisp family ever since I first encountered The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs now more than a decade ago. At the time I was disappointed that such beautiful systems found so little use in day to day programming. Lisp seemed both deeply pragmatic (Objects!)…

65

Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

When you use Rust, it is sometimes outright preposterous how much knowledge of language, and how much of programming ingenuity and curiosity you need in order to accomplish the most trivial things. When you feel particularly desperate, you go to rust/issues and search for a solution for your problem. Suddenly, you…

67

The Little Printf

This text is a transcript of a presentation I have given on October 9, 2015, at the CityCode conference in Chicago. This content is also available in video , and as a PDF Document better suited for printing.

69

A possible new back end for Rust

So typically when you want to make your own compiled language you need a compiler to.. well.. compile it into something useful. Then making it work across a wide range of operating systems and CPU architectures is a huge effort, let alone having it be performant. This is where LLVM comes in.

76

Curl is C

For some reason, this post got picked up again and is debated today in 2021, almost 4 years since I wrote it. Some things have changed in the mean time and I might've phrased a few things differently if I had written this today. But still, what's here below is what I wrote back then. … Continue reading curl is C →

77

Wat

This talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes every other week, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git.

83

Pin

The Pin type (and the concept of pinning in general) is a foundational building block on which the rest of the the Rust async ecosystem stands. Unfortunately, it has also been one of the least accessible and most misunderstood elements of async Rust. This post is meant to explain what Pin achieves, how it came to be…

85

Four days of Go

Part of my work involves the mild reverse-engineering of binary file formats. I say “mild” because usually other people do all of the actual work; I just have to figure out what an extra flag field or two means, and I then take as much credit as possible for the discovery on my blog.

89

Why I'm Betting On Julia

The problem with most programming languages is they’re designed by language geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don’t much care for. Safety, type systems, homoiconicity, and so forth. I’m sure these things are great, but when I’m messing around with a new project for fun, my two concerns are 1) making it work…

90

Why Janet? (2023)

I never thought it could happen to me. I mean, parentheses? In this day and age? But for the past couple years, my go-to programming language for fun side projects has been a little Lisp dialect called Janet. (print "hey janet") I like Janet so much that I wrote an entire book about it, and put it on The Internet for…