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

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1771

Implementing Forth in Go and C

I first ran into Forth about 20 years ago when reading a book about designing embedded hardware . The reason I got the book back then was to actually learn more about the HW aspects, so having skimmed the Forth chapter I just registered an "oh, this is neat" mental note and moved on with my life. Over the last two…

1772

Reasoning with Types in Rust

Hi, I'm Ariel (she/her), a newly-minted member of the Swift team at Apple ! Previously, I helped lead the Luau team at Roblox where my efforts primarily focused on the design and implementation of Luau 's type system. I also led the creation of Lute to support using Luau both to build developer tooling, and as a…

1775

Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)

People complain about Rust syntax. I think that most of the time when people think they have an issue with Rust's syntax, they actually object to Rust's semantics. In this slightly whimsical post, I'll try to disentangle the two.

1776

Almost Always Unsigned

Almost Always Unsigned # Written by Dale Weiler Twitter GitHub Last updated Saturday, January 1, 2022 The need for signed integer arithmetic is often misplaced as most integers never represent negative values within a program. The indexing of arrays and iteration count of a loop reflects this concept as well. There…

1778

Why Perl?

I sometimes get asked why I use Perl so much. Am I not a fan of strongly typed functional programming? Yeah, I am. Ask me to write something that is known, for sure , to become a big system and I’ll pick strongly typed functional programming without hesitation. 1 1 And, of course, put me in a team that uses Blub, and…

1786

Julia's multiple dispatch explained with Pokemons

T hese days, I find myself evangelizing for Julia quite a bit. It’s a good language, especially for scientific computing, but I believe its focus on performance also makes it a good general language as well. At some level, programmers who know multiple languages have an abstract understanding of the constructs used…

1793

Porting C to Rust

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1794

Realizing Hackett, a metaprogrammable Haskell

Almost five months ago, I wrote a blog post about my new programming language, Hackett , a fanciful sketch of a programming language from a far-off land with Haskell’s type system and Racket’s macros. At that point in time, I had a little prototype that barely worked, that I barely understood, and was a little bit of…

1798

Problems with Go channels (2016)

Update: If you’re coming to this blog post from a compendium titled “Go is not good,” I want to make it clear that I am ashamed to be on such a list. Go is absolutely the least worst programming language I’ve ever used. At the time I wrote this, I wanted to curb a trend I was seeing, namely, overuse of one of the more…