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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 427 posts.

2020
282

Parsing S-expressions in C (2019)

Over the past couple weeks I've been trying to work out how I want to store my game configuration. At first I started playing with XML, which was nice because I could stream a file rather than loading the entire thing into memory but I turned away from XML because …

283

Nim Community Survey 2019 Results

Nim community survey 2019 has been open for 50 days, and we have received 908 responses, which is our record-high number (771 in 2018, 603 in 2017). Before we go into details, we would like to thank all the people who took the time to respond. We really appreciate the feedback!

291

Fighting Rust's Expressive Type System

Herein I share an experienced developer's first foray into a real-world Rust project. It focuses closely on the type system, and the key insights I needed to begin "thinking in Rust". Written for those getting to grips with the language, it will be especially useful if your background isn't functional programming.

292

The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now: one anecdotally comparing programming languages in the Lisp family. I consider myself to be a Lisp hacker. Perhaps that much was obvious from the letter λ adorning my website's header, a reference to the λ-calculus which inspired John McCarthy to design the…

294

Rust testing or verifying: Why not both?

Dijkstra famously dissed testing by saying “Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!” As if you should choose one over the other. I don’t see them as opposites but as complementary techniques that should both be used to improve the quality of your code.

300

Taking PHP Seriously (2016)

Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if…