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A reckless introduction to Hindley-Milner type inference (2019)
(I've been editing this post on and off for almost a year. I'm not really happy with it, but I suspect I never will be.)
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Programming Languages
The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 246 posts.
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There is no such thing as a global method in Ruby
What Ruby’s top-level methods actually are, who they belong to and how they are namespaced
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Gleam: A Basic Introduction
Gleam is a statically-typed functional programming language, which recently had its v1 released, designed for building scalable and maintainable software. It
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A Tour of Hell – Shell scripting Haskell dialect
This set of slides sketches out the implementation of Hell , in technical detail. I do tend to switch between the slides, old code, and the present code, so bear with me. It's more about the ideas. If you want to see a complete implementation, the complete implementation of Hell is one file , which you can look…
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Damas-Hindley-Milner inference two ways
What is Damas-Hindley-Milner?
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Array languages vs. the curse of the spreadsheet
It has been said that the most popular programming language in the world is the spreadsheet (and in particular these days, Excel). There...
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Clojure macros continue to surprise me
Clojure macros have two modes: avoid them at all costs/do very basic stuff, or go absolutely crazy.
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Into CPS, Never to Return
CPS, or continuation-passing style, is an intermediate representation for programs, particularly functional programs. It’s used in compilers for languages such as SML and Scheme. Much of its utility comes from its support for tail calls and nonlocal control flow such as call/cc, but it can also be used as an…
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What would it take to add refinement types to Rust?
A few years ago, on a whim, I wrote YAIOUOM. YAOIOUM was a static analyzer for Rust that checked that the code was using units of measures correctly, e.g. a distance in meters is not a distance in centimeters, dividing meters by seconds gave you a value in m / s (aka m * s^-1). YAIOUOM was an example of a refinement…
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Clojure's machine learning ecosystem
I had a really enlightening talk with Daniel Slutsky this week (who is an exceptional data scientist, software engineer, and community organizer I highly…
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SaberVM
This post announces SaberVM, an abstract machine for functional programs that guarantees safety, reliability, and portability.
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TypedDicts are better than you think
TypedDict was introduced in PEP-589 which landed in Python 3.8. The primary use case was to create type annotations for dictionaries. For example,...
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The upcoming iterator design for Go 1.23
NOTE: This is based on, but completely rewritten, from a Twitter post:https://x.com/TheGingerBill/status/1802645945642799423TL;DR: It makes Go feel too "functional" rather than being an unabashed imperative language.I recently saw a post on Twitter showing the upcoming Go iterator design for Go 1.23 (August 2024)…
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Array Languages: R vs. APL (2023)
I’ve been learning at least one new programming language a month through Exercism which has been really fun and interesting. I frequently say that “every language you learn teaches you something about all the others you know” and with nearly a dozen under my belt so far I’m starting to worry about the combinatorics of…
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The end of "Useless Ruby sugar": On intuitions and evolutions
I wrote the analysis of “useless sugar” features of Ruby for two months, and I regret nothing.
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An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)
SBCL is a Common Lisp implementation, with a performant compiler and support for a wide range of platforms. It has excellent documentation , and even a guide to internals (... this is written towards people who already know a lot about how it works though). This paper about SBCL's fairly unique build process is also…
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Significant features introduced for recent versions of Perl
History of Perl releases since version 5.6, each with a summary of added or changed features.
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Rust's Sneaky Deadlock With `if let` Blocks
Rust is my favorite programming language. I've been writing Rust for about 6 years, from college to professionally, and I'm vocal about how helpful the compi...
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Shape typing in Python
While I was looking the other way, Python got advanced static types! Here’s matrix multiplication, describing the input shapes and its output shape:
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Where does the name "algebraic data type" come from?
A blog about functional programming
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Why is Common Lisp not the most popular programming language?
This question is always asked. My thoughts are a little bit different than what I've read online.
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Bitten by Unicode
One product of mine takes reports that come in as a table that’s been exported to PDF, which means text extraction. For dollar figures I find a prefixed dollar symbol and convert the number following it into a float . If there’s a hyphen in addition to the dollar symbol, it’s negative.
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Code Generation in Rust vs. C++26
One of the things I like to do is compare how different languages solve the same problem — especially when they end up having very different approaches. It’s always educational. In this case, a bunch of us have been working hard on trying to get reflection — a really transformative language feature — into C++26…
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The intricacies of implementing memoization in Ruby
A long time ago, I wrote a memoization library for Ruby. It was not easy, but I learned a great deal in the process. In this article, I am share these learnings and showing you how deep the memoization rabbit hole goes.
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Pair Your Compilers at the ABI Café
Not sure if your compilers have matching ABIs? Then put them through the ultimate compatibility crucible and pair them up on a shift at The ABI Café! Find out if your one true pairing fastcalls for each other or are just another slowburn disaster. (Maid outfits optional but recommended.)