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

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1686

Notes on the Crystal Language

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1688

PureScript and Haskell

Two years ago, I starting learning PureScript. I had been intrigued by purely functional programming for some time but had failed to learn Haskell once or twice. PureScript seemed to be a kinder, gentler introduction to this world while retaining the fundamental properties of pureness that made Haskell intriguing to…

1689

I hate the Pumping Lemma

I hate the Pumping Lemma for regular languages. It’s a complicated way to express an idea that is fundamentally very simple, and it isn’t even a very good way to prove that a language is not regula…

1692

Python's Innards: Introduction (2010)

A friend once said to me: You know, to some people, C is just a bunch of macros that expand to assembly . It’s been years ago (smartasses: it was also before llvm , ok?), but the sentence stuck with me. Do Kernighan and Ritchie really look at a C program and see assembly code? Does Tim Berners-Lee surf the Web any…

1694

Four Years of Jai (2024)

I’ve been programming for long enough to be righteously cantankerous about a lot of things. The list of languages, frameworks and libraries I’ve worked with professionally or on personal projects is too long to list – but it includes everything from C and assembly languages through C++, Pascal and Delphi, through Java…

1702

Initialization in C++ is Seriously Bonkers

I was recently reminded of why I think it’s a bad idea to teach beginners C++. It’s a bad idea because it is an objective mess—albeit a beautiful, twisted, tragic, wondrous mess. Despite the current state of the community, this post is not a polemic against modern C++. This post is partly a follow-up on Simon Brand’s…

1703

Own Constant Folder in C/C++

I was talking with someone today that really really wanted the sqrtps to be used in some code they were writing. And because of a quirk with clang (still there as of clang 18.1.0), if you happened to use -ffast-math clang would butcher the use of the intrinsic. So for the code: __m128 test(const __m128 vec) { return…

1706

When zero cost abstractions aren't zero cost

Rust is built around the concept of “zero cost abstraction”. The idea is that you can write human-friendly high level code and the compiler will give you for free performance at least as good as any optimized low level code you could have written yourself. With zero cost abstraction, you no longer have to trade off…

1710

The Isolation Trap: Erlang

Erlang's mailbox design is more disciplined than Go's channels: only the owning process can read from a mailbox, and sends are asynchronous. Yet the four failure modes of shared mutable state still show up, just in different shapes.