Topics /

Programming Languages

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

Any year
2858

Why Learn Compilers (2021)

A sufficient understanding of computers is impossible without learning how compilers and their parts work. It is like stepping into the computer's mind and seeing how it feels from the inside. Compil...

2860

NoiseLang: Where N = 5 is a Dirac delta

A signals-and-noise course left me writing Monte Carlo math on paper and wishing the notation itself would run. Nine years later, with an AI agent doing the heavy lifting, NoiseLang became a real Monte Carlo language that runs the same fused kernel on the GPU, on every CPU core, and on WebAssembly.

2864

The Language Construction Kit (1996, 2012)

Caja de herramientas para construir idiomas (en español; traducido por Renato Montes) O Kit de Construção de Línguas (em português; traduzido por Gustavo Pereira) Il Kit di Costruzione di Linguaggi (in italiano; tradotto per Daniele "MadMage" Calisi) Der Sprachbaukasten (auf Deutsch; übersetzt von Carsten Becker)

2869

The new and improved Programming Languages Zoo

It is my pleasure to announce the new and improved Programming languages Zoo , a potpourri of miniature but fully functioning programming language implementations. The new zoo has a decent web site, it is now hosted on GitHub , and the source code was cleaned up. Many thanks to Matija Pretnar for all the work.

2872

Another go at the Next Big Language

2007 was a different time for languages. While Java held the popular crown, the mainstream programming community were still coming to terms with Java 6. Released 3 months earlier, it was very much an evolution of the Java 5 watershed. Its arrival heralded the end of life for Java 1.4 and represented an opportunity to…

2873

C and C++ Aren't Future Proof

My hope would be option 1 for application code (as opposed to the “systems code” that you have there): fewer and fewer people use these languages to write application code. Moreover, I think that’s probably happening to some extent.

2875

Move, simply

C++ “move” semantics are simple, and unchanged since C++11. But they are still widely misunderstood, sometimes because of unclear teaching and sometimes because of a desire to view move…