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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.

Any year
1532

Clojure is cool

I had heard of it years ago, but never really gave it a lot of thought (or time) to it, despite being a huge fan of Common Lisp and a bit of a language polyglot. I think part of my initial reluctance may have been 'java' - as I would typically associate just the negatives to it (cumbersome language syntax, slow start…

1535

Which Parsing Approach?

We all know that parsing is an important part of designing and implementing programming languages, but it’s the equivalent of Brussels sprouts: good for the diet, but a taste that only a select few enjoy. Unfortunately, I’ve come to realise that our general distaste for parsing is problematic. While many of us think…

1539

My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021)

Last year I finally decided to learn some Rust. The official book by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols is excellent, but even after reading it and working on some small code exercises, I felt that I needed more to really understand the language. I wanted to work on a small project to get some hands-on experience, but…

1540

Get a Life

When I was a kid, I wrote a BASIC program to explore Conway’s Game of Life on my 8088. It was painfully slow, so I began an assembly rewrite. But I failed at Life: I abandoned the project in frustration because I kept freezing up my system.

1548

Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

Perl is a dynamic, dynamically-typed, high-level, scripting (interpreted) language most comparable with PHP and Python. Perl's syntax owes a lot to ancient shell scripting tools, and it is famed for its overuse of confusing symbols, the majority of which are impossible to Google ...

1550

C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers

Anyone who's written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn't for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and…

1555

F (2006)

F is a pure functional concatenative language originally designed as an extension of False . F contains the list-operations of K3 and the dip combinator of Joy . Floating-point and symbolic datatypes are supported. One-time assignment is enforced in syntax. A theory of function-valence and -charge is outlined. F also…

1560

Never trust a programmer who says they know C++

I’ve been in an interviewing mindset for awhile and I’ve come to realize something important about C++ in particular. C++ is a “two peak” language. That is to say C++ is the only language I know of where two very different sets of programmers consider themselves well versed in the language. Let me show you in fake…