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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 258 posts.

2020
158

Parsing S-expressions in C (2019)

Over the past couple weeks I've been trying to work out how I want to store my game configuration. At first I started playing with XML, which was nice because I could stream a file rather than loading the entire thing into memory but I turned away from XML because …

163

The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now: one anecdotally comparing programming languages in the Lisp family. I consider myself to be a Lisp hacker. Perhaps that much was obvious from the letter λ adorning my website's header, a reference to the λ-calculus which inspired John McCarthy to design the…

165

Rust testing or verifying: Why not both?

Dijkstra famously dissed testing by saying “Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!” As if you should choose one over the other. I don’t see them as opposites but as complementary techniques that should both be used to improve the quality of your code.

169

A Little Clojure

This expression: (1 2) represents the list containing the integers 1 and 2 in that order. If you want an empty list, that’s just () . And the list of the first five letters of the alphabet is just (\a \b \c \d \e) .

170

F# Data Type Providers in .Net Core (2018)

As one of F#'s killer features; type providers have the ability to make rooms full of developers gasp when shown for the first time. Support has recently been added to the FSharp.Data library [https://www.nuget.org/packages/FSharp.Data] for .Net Standard 2.0, allowing us to

175

Yes, I am still learning Rust

Recently, I got yet another nice email from a “talent sourcing specialist” asking me if I’d like to work for their company. This one stood out from the usual blockchain recruiting spam by actually looking at this blog. And they told me their expectations were lowered by the front matter stating that I’m currently…

176

A gentle intro to assembly with Rust

One of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while is really dig into assembly and get into the weeds of how programs actually run. A rework of the asm macro has recently landed in nightly rust so it seemed like a good time.

180

R7RS versus R6RS (2018)

InPhase asked today on #scheme about the R7RS vs R6RS debate. I followed the original debate closely and have experience both using and implementing R6RS. I also recently added R7RS support in Akku.scm 0.3.0, so I feel like I can weigh in on this. It’s a topic that many feel passionately about, and I’m also firmly on…