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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 204 posts.

2014
121

Teenage Haskell

I’ve been inspired by the efforts of others (Chris Smith, Manuel Chakravarty) to try teaching children haskell as a first experience of programming. Haskell has a reputation of being a "…

127

Types Are The Truth

In Chapter 9 of Types and Programming Languages , Pierce presents his exposition of the Simply typed Lambda-Calculus. It is a truly awesome chapter - each subsection in succession constructs a rich and very well detailed system of computation and Pierce is a master of precision, guiding the reader through the maze of…

129

What's wrong with statistics in Julia?

Introduction Link to heading Several months ago, I promised to write an updated version of my old post, “The State of Statistics in Julia”, that would describe how Julia’s support for statistical computing has evolved since December 2012. I’ve kept putting off writing that post for several reasons, but the most…

133

Allocators in Rust

There has been a lot of discussion lately about Rust’s allocator story, and in particular our relationship to jemalloc. I’ve been trying to catch up, and I wanted to try and summarize my understanding and explain for others what is going on. I am trying to be as factually precise in this post as possible. If you see a…

134

Things from Python I'd miss in Go

Let's assume Go has one killer feature – cheap concurrency – not present in any other language with similar serial performance (ruling out say Erlang). And let's agree that it gives Go its perfect niche – and we're only discussing uses of Go outside that niche from now on. So we won't come back to concurrency till the…

141

Programming without objects

Recently I gave an itemis internal talk about basic functional programming (FP) concepts. Towards the end I made a claim that objects and their blueprints (a.k.a. classes) have severe downsides and that it is much better to "leave data alone", which is exactly how Clojure and Haskell treat this subject.

146

Value Types for Java – A sketch of proposed enhancements

This is a sketch of proposed enhancements to the Java Virtual Machine instruction set, and secondarily to the Java Language, to support small immutable, identityless value types . (They may also be considered as identityless aggregates, user-defined primitives, immutable records, or restricted classes.) This is an…