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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 146 posts.

2013
94

PyPy.js: First Steps

I've been spending a lot of time in JavaScript land lately. It's not totally unexpected – when I first applied for a job with Mozilla, I was warned only semi-jokingly that "they hire all the best Python programmers and then force them to write JavaScript". I've no deep love or hate for it as a language, but JavaScript…

96

Write Yourself a Haskell in Lisp

For me, the best way to understand something is usually to implement it myself. So when I first started getting serious about Haskell, I implemented (in Common Lisp) a simple lazy functional programming language that used graph rewriting for the interpretation. Then, years later, I mentioned this implementation in a…

103

Bytecode

What is the most commonly used bytecode language in the world? Java (JVM Bytecode)? .NET (CLI)? Flash (AVM1/AVM2)? Nope. There’s a few that you use every day, simply by turning on your computer, or tablet, or even phone. You don’t even have to start an application or visit a webpage.

105

Destructuring Assignment in ECMAScript 6

I have seen this question come up a few times, and unfortunately, people usually don't find an answer, give up, and don't test their source maps. However, testing source maps isn't too hard if you are using Node.js and the mozilla/source-map library. If you aren't using Node.js and the mozilla/source-map library, you…

111

C and C++ Aren't Future Proof

My hope would be option 1 for application code (as opposed to the “systems code” that you have there): fewer and fewer people use these languages to write application code. Moreover, I think that’s probably happening to some extent.

114

Clojure from the ground up: Macros

In Chapter 1 , I asserted that the grammar of Lisp is uniform: every expression is a list, beginning with a verb, and followed by some arguments. Evaluation proceeds from left to right, and every element of the list must be evaluated before evaluating the list itself. Yet we just saw, at the end of Sequences , an…

120

Writing HTTP Middleware in Go

In the context of web development, "middleware" usually stands for "a part of an application that wraps the original application, adding additional functionality". It's a concept that usually seems to be somewhat underappreciated, but I think middleware is great.