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Top-Down LR Parsing
This semester, I am teaching Compilers , and I'm quite happy with how I covered parsing this year. Specifically, I taught students to build a top-down LR parser and it seemed to go relatively well.
Topics /
Programming Languages
The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 264 posts.
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Ruby's private keyword is weird
Ruby's `private` keyword means something different compared to basically all other object-oriented languages. Most other languages don't even have a feature matching what Ruby calls `private`, but incredibly, Scala does, which it calls `protected[this]` (meaning
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Why checked exceptions failed
Programming language features are never orthogonal.
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Compiling Typed Python
With a little effort, you can make your mypy-typed Python go zoom.
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Making Lenses Practical in Java
How (and why!) to convince the machines to write lenses for you
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Language Pragmatics Engineering
On best practices and gradient descent.
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APL: An Array Oriented Programming Language (2018)
APL was invented by Ken Iverson in the early 1960s as a notation for array oriented calculations. It was precise and useful enough, so it…
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Does Go Have Subtyping?
I’ve been noodling on a static type system for my current hobby language. To try to keep the language as simple as possible, I’m trying to see if I can live without subtyping. Since most of my programming experience is in object-oriented languages, I’ve been learning more about languages that lack—or at least claim to…
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Church vs. Curry Types
Static vs dynamic typing debates often flounder because the debators see from two different perspectives without knowing it. Learning to identify the two perspectives can calm the discussion. The tension between the two perspectives has led to Gradual Typing and other technologies.
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"Useless Ruby sugar": Endless (one-line) methods
Or, about the virtue of exactly one phrase.
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The Changing "Guarantees" Given by Python's Global Interpreter Lock
A look into the implementation details of CPython's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and how they changed between Python 3.9 and the current development branch that will become Python 3.13.
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Visual programming with Elixir: Learning to write binary parsers (2019)
Visualize binary protocols by building parsers in Elixir.
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Iterators in Go: A proposed extension
Iterators in Go are a neat way to write “lazy loops”, where we never generate more results than we actually use. Let’s see what that would look like in Go programs, and what new facilities it gives us in the standard library.
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Ash: A Gentle Primer
An introduction to Ash Framework, written for new Elixir developers. Comes with LiveBooks for interactive examples, live-coding video walkthrough, and illustrations.
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Why Rust helps even if you have to use a lot of `unsafe`
I semi-regularly hear developers who claim that using Rust would not gain them anything because they would have to use `unsafe`. But this is not true. Local reasoning matters.
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Types versus sets (and what about categories?) (2022)
A recent Twitter thread brought home to me that there is widespread confusion about what types actually are, even among the most prominent researchers. In particular: are types the same thing as sets ? At the risk of repeating some of my prior posts, perhaps it’s time for a little history about type theory, set theory…
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30 years of Brainfuck
Has nerd sniping gone too far?
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Haskell WebAssembly in the Browser
As far as I know this is the first Haskell program compiled to Webassembly (WASM) with mainline ghc and using the browser DOM.
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Is it possible to write games like Pac-Man in a functional language? (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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