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

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2674

Baking the Y Combinator from Scratch

EDIT: Part 2 is up! It's a pedagogical pet peeve of mine when technical concepts are simply listed in their fully developed state, with little in the way of motivation, derivation, or historical context. This, I think, is like publishing a cookbook filled with beautiful pictures of cakes, but

2675

Set theory with types

It is known that mathematics is heavily reliant on set theory, but no one can agree on what set theory is. Many people today understand that we have a choice between set theory and type theory , but they don’t know what type theory is either. Many think that type theory refers to some sort of dependent type theory, as…

2680

Fast high-level programming languages

Python and R are slow when they can’t rely on functionality or libraries backed by C/C++. They are inefficient not only for certain algorithm development but also for common tasks such as FASTQ parsing. Using these languages limits the reach of biologists. Sometimes you may have a brilliant idea but can’t deliver a…

2682

Rust’s worst feature

There are several aspects of Rust that I’m not particularly fond of but the one that takes the cake is core::io::BorrowedBuf which I despise with passion. It’s a nightly feature which puts in question my extreme emotions about it. On the other hand it means there’s time to stop it from getting stabilised and figure…

2684

Go Bloviations

This post was written sixteen months ago, when fish briefly explored Go with the intention of writing a new command line shell. ( fish abandoned Go after discovering that terminal programming is what makes shells so horrible, and term programming is least horrible in C.)

2688

Writing C for Curl

It is a somewhat common question to me: how do we write C in curl to make it safe and secure for billions of installations? Some precautions we take and decisions we make. There is no silver bullet, just guidelines. As I think you can see for yourself below they are also neither strange nor … Continue reading Writing…

2690

Rare Greek Variables

I scrape Arxiv to find underused Greek variables which can add some diversity to math; the top 10 underused letters are ϰ, ς, υ, ϖ, Υ, Ξ, ι, ϱ, ϑ, & Π. Avoid overused letters like λ, and spice up your next paper with some memorable variables!

2691

Modern C

This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23 . The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the…

2693

The Next Big Language

Dylan? C# 3? Perl 6? Does it have deterministic destructors, even as blocks like Python 2.5? Generics? A powerful macro system? Even as described it sounds like magic, but not a moment too soon.

2696

Unpacking Elixir: Syntax

Elixir is a language with syntactical roots in Ruby. It also carries the Erlang legacy. Legacy used here as in "a great legacy" and not as in "system you don't like anymore". Ruby is an object-oriented language. Elixir is functional language. The Erlang part has an impact as Elixir was designed to provide strong…

2698

First impressions about Graal VM

Last week was the release of Oracle’s GraalVM. As stated on the website: GraalVM is a universal virtual machine for running applications written in JavaScript, Python 3, Ruby, R, JVM-based languages like Java, Scala, Kotlin, and LLVM-based languages such as C and C++. GraalVM removes the isolation between programming…