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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 274 posts.

2017
242

Manipulate Functions with the J Language

The Pragmatic Programmer recommends that we learn at least one new language every year. To be effective, the languages we learn should differ sufficiently from those we already master and ideally introduce us to a new paradigm too. Learning a different programming language affects the way we view code. A new paradigm…

254

Typed nils in Go 2

This is an experience report about a gotcha in Go that catches every Go programmer at least once. The following program is extracted from a larger version that caused my co-workers to lose several hours today.

261

Whither Swift?

I've been asking myself the question, what is Apple's plan for Swift and Objective-C? When Swift became public in 2014, its creator Chris Lattner seemed to claim that Swift and Objective-C would coexist indefinitely. From an xcode-users mailing list post:

264

What is “Open Recursion”?

Someone on StackOverflow stumbled onto the strange term “open recursion” and asked what it meant . Since most of the other answers to this online are pretty opaque, I started writing an answer. But then I accidentally wrote a blog post.

267

Bootstrapping a Type System (2010)

Magpie has reached a strange but neat little milestone on the road from “weird experiment” to “real language”: the type system is now bootstrapped. I’m not aware of any other languages where a statement like that is even meaningful (maybe Typed Scheme ?), much less true , so I’ll try to break that down.