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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 133 posts.

2012
1

PHP: A fractal of bad design

(This article has been translated into Spanish (PDF, with some additions) by Jorge Amado Soria Ramirez — thanks!) Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us

2

Wat

This talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes every other week, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git.

5

Never create Ruby strings longer than 23 characters

Obviously this is an utterly preposterous statement: it’s hard to think of a more ridiculous and esoteric coding requirement. I can just imagine all sorts of amusing conversations with designers and business sponsors: “No... the size of this <input> field should be 23... 24 is just too long!” Or: “We need to explain…

6

CoffeeScript: less typing, bad readability

I’ve used CoffeeScript for a few months now. Coming from Python, I felt that CoffeeScript was more concise than Javascript, so I decided to use it for a few small projects. Initially, it was a nice experience, but then I gradually realized that, while writing CoffeeScript code was very pleasant, reading it wasn’t so…

8

PHP Sucks But I Like It

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It’s been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it’s rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it

9

PHP Addiction

I wrote Tumblr, Instapaper, and Second Crack in PHP. I continue to use it because I know it extremely well, it’s very easy to use and deploy, and it’s nearly maintenance-free on servers. When you’re a programmer forced to also be your own sysadmin, that’s very attractive.

21

JavaScript Needs Blocks

While reading Hacker News posts about JavaScript, I often come across the misconception that Ruby's blocks are essentially equivalent to JavaScript's "first class functions". Because the ability to pass functions around, especially when you can create them anonymously, is extremely powerful, the fact that both…

24

Objectivist C

Although academic computer scientists have generally dismissed Objectivist-C, it has a zealous following among self-taught programmers and college sophomores.