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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.
My essay “In Search of Types” attempts to be a dispassionate review of some of the different concepts, purposes and attitudes surrounding the word “type” in programming. I imagine that my passions are still rather thinly veiled in places. But in this post I'm going to come out with a more unabashedly ranty take…
robhu has a good point over here . At the moment we write Javascript in web pages, which is then compiled down by the various JIT methods that Firefox/IE/Webkit use to make it super fast. Seeing as what's run clearly isn't the actual JS itself, but bytecode, why not have a standardised bytecode…
Its declarative lunch was partly eaten
Even relatively new C programmers have no trouble reading simple C declarations such as
It will chew you up and spit you out, and you'll not even complain. I often start new projects at the beginning of the year, around Dec...
Summary: In 2021 I learned Smalltalk, mostly using the lovely Pharo implementation. While the syntax of the language is quite nice, it...
Go 1.18 will be a significant release of the programming language that will contain some major features that I’m excited about. The upcoming version is scheduled for early 2022. The first beta should be out in a month. Let’s take a look at some of the new features that will be available.
Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it. Heaps were one, just about the only thing I got out of my truncated CS education. I recently stumbled onto another: Pratt or…
After two years of being open source and a lot of development, Specter has reached 1.0. In this po...
In this post I will make the case for the concept of a “runtime resizable struct” in Zig. I will then design an API by exploiting Zig’s powerful comptime functionality.
UPDATE: Check out the Podcast I did with Erik Meijer on Hanselminutes this week ...
Kari Marttila’s Blog (e.g. cloud and Clojure related articles)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
I previously wrote about explicitness in Elixir. One of my favorite ways the language embraces explicitness is in its distinction between eager and lazy operations on collections. Any time you use the Enum module, you’re performing an eager operation. Your collection will be transformed/mapped/enumerated immediately…
My Thursday CppCon talk is now online. Note: There’s already a Reddit thread for it, so if you want to comment on the video I suggest you use that thread instead of creating a new one. At Cpp…
In the article about Standard Library hardening, we looked at checks for invalid Standard Library container access and other broken preconditions. I mentioned that those requirements are expressed in terms of “contracts”. But what about our code? In this post, we’ll explore contracts from C++26. We’ll start with a…
Building UIs in HTML+CSS can be untenable. When making complex frontend experiences, I reach for Elm.
There is no way for your operating system to know exactly how much stack space a thread will need so it allocates an amount on the order of around a kilobyte initially and then around a megabyte once the thread starts to be used. You only have around a bakers dozen gigabytes of RAM, so you can only have give or take…
