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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.
Sometimes I see unsourced, unclear, vaguely mystical claims about K being the fastest array language. It happens often enough that I'd like to write a long-form rebuttal to these, and a demand that the people who make these do more to justify them.
When writing concurrent Rust you will encounter Arc and Mutex types sooner or later. And although Mutex might already sound familiar as it's a concept known in many languages, chances are you haven't heard about Arc before Rust. What's more, you can't fully understand these concepts without tying them to the ownership…
I show how to use heterogeneous lists and traits to implement a type-safe printf in Rust. These mechanisms can ensure that two variadic argument lists share important properties, like the number of format string holes matches the number of printf arguments.
Blog of Vincent Rolfs. Vincent is a freelance Software Engineer and IT-Consultant. He has more than ten years experience in developing complex applications on the web.
Recently I was discussing Converge with someone, and mentioned how little time the core compiler had taken to implement (no compile-time meta-programming, limited error checking, but a functioning compiler nonetheless) - only a few days. The chap I was talking to looked at me and told me that he didn’t believe me. I…
Dr. Alan Kay explains when "object-oriented" was first used and what it means. []
In my last post I floated the idea of writing a slow, edit-prone shell script instead as a self-rebuilding C program.
I built a tiny programming language where programs are candy grids, complete with a renderer, photo decoder, AST tree, and execution trace.
Dave MacQueen (with Robert Harper and John Reppy) has written a 100-page History of Standard ML . Here I offer my brief, personal and utterly subjective impressions of its early days, up to the deeply unfortunate schism that created what was then called Caml . Standard ML was a tragic missed opportunity. But even…
I believe that to really learn a programming language, I have to get involved in a project. Getting an overview of the Elixir language was…
In this article, we explore the possibilities allowed by higher inductive types. They enable a much more intuitive formalization of integers and new mind-blowing definitions of the (homotopical) ci…
Mark Engelberg wrote a very interesting post titled Logic Programming is Overrated . I take issue with a quite a few points made in that post and I would like to address a couple of them here.
Stuff about things
Our on-the-ground reporter gauges developer reactions to the Python Steering Council's latest decision regarding pattern matching.
In programming research, we say a lot about programs and languages, but very little about the actual process of programming. One simple trick that will make programming language research significantly more interesting is to think about programs not as expressions, but as a result of a sequence of interactions that…
For better or worse, we count lines of code. We (hopefully) feel a little dirty when we do it, because it's a flawed metric. But we do it . We do it on large codebases and small code snippets . Even badass hacker David Nolen does it .
In my last few articles about Erlang we've covered the basics of network programming with gen_tcp and Erlang/OTP's gen_server, or generic server, module. Let's combine the two.
Why is Rust being used to replace parts of the JavaScript web ecosystem like minification (Terser), transpilation (Babel), formatting (Prettier), bundling (webpack), linting (ESLint), and more?
Paul Graham has written a bunch of good essays on entrepreneurship, laying down much of the philosophy behind Y Combinator . If you’ve not read any of them yet, you should go and read them now – they contain lots of wisdom.
It's been a while since the last update about my work on the Inko programming language . Not because there hasn't been any progress, but because I've been busy making changes. A lot of changes.
The relative performance of C and C++ is the stuff of folk legends and Very Strong Opinions. There are microbenchmarks that can prove differ...
Meet G#: expressive data types, explicit nullability, and structured concurrency on .NET. Explore real examples and run your first project.
Curried functions are probably one of the first new things you come across if you go from an imperative language to a functional language. In purely functional languages, the convention is to define an n-parameter function inductively by staggering the parameters: applying the function to argument #1 returns a…
All the “C++ killers”, even these which I wholeheartedly love and respect like Rust, Julia, and D, help you write more features with fewer bugs, but they don't much help when you need to squeeze the very last FLOPS from the hardware you rent. As such, they don’t have a competitive advantage over C++. Or, for that…
Functional programming is an increasing popular programming paradigm with many languages building or already supporting it. Go already supports some of these features such as first-class and higher order functions and enabling functional programming.
I’d originally planned to write on this particular topic in response to increasing outreach to me personally, through my blog and other places, unsolicited, and independently from multiple communit…
Things I enjoy in Rust:
The Scala language is large and complex, and it provides a variety of tools that a developer can use to do the same thing in a variety of ways. Given the range of possible solutions to every problem, how can a developer choose which one should be used? This is the first in a series of blog posts aiming to provide…
