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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 390 posts.

2023
271

Tree-Structured Concurrency

For a while now I've been trying to find a good way to explain what structured concurrency is, and how it applies to Rust. I've come up with zingers such as: "Structured concurrency is structured programming as applied to concurrent control-flow primitives" . But that requires me to start explaining what structured…

278

My mental model of Clojure transducers

I’ve been programming in Clojure for a long time, but I haven’t been using transducers much. I learned to mechanically transform (into [] (map f coll)) to (into [] (map f) coll) for a slight performance gain, but not much beyond that. Recently, however, I’ve found myself refactoring transducers-based code at work…

279

Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript

By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I've seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler. But I've never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it's with great pleasure that I can…

282

Writing Linux Modules in Ada (2016)

In the following series of blog posts I will document my attempts to write Linux modules using the Ada language. In part 1, I will demonstrate how to write in Ada and build a simple "hello world" Linux kernel module. Additionally, I will introduce a basic customized Ada runtime to support our "hello world" module…

284

Modular Errors in Rust

It is thankfully common wisdom nowadays that documentation must be placed as near as possible to the code it documents, and should be fine-grained to a minimal unit of describability (the thing being documented). The practice provides numerous benefits to the codebase and project as a whole:

288

Was BASIC that horrible or better?

Everything was fine until BASIC entered the picture. Edsger Dijkstra in a hallucination of 2023’s AI Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally…

290

What's Going on with Language Rankings?

As the inbound DMs and emails attest, at least a few of you out there having been waiting for RedMonk to drop our latest version of the programming language rankings. Our apologies about the delay: here’s our update on the process. Normally we run these rankings twice a year, with the goal of using publicly

291

Let's Build a Compiler (1988)

This series of articles is a tutorial on the theory and practice of developing language parsers and compilers. Before we are finished, we will have covered every aspect of compiler construction, designed a new programming language, and built a working compiler.

292

Common Lisp and Music Composition

Once upon a time, there were many music composition software packages, mostly written in Common LISP. To name a few I know, Common Music, Symbolic Composer (not related to the Symbolics Lisp Machine). Common Music is still available in source code but I doubt if anyone is still able to setup that. Symbolic Composer…

293

mruby 3.2.0

mruby is the lightweight implementation of the Ruby language complying to (part of) the ISO standard. mruby can be linked and embedded within your application. We provide the interpreter program

298

JEP 400: UTF-8 by Default

Specify UTF-8 as the default charset of the standard Java APIs. With this change, APIs that depend upon the default charset will behave consistently across all implementations, operating systems, locales, and configurations.