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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 5,634 posts.
Tiny Lisp Computer
This article describes a self-contained computer with its own display and keyboard interface, based on an ATmega328, that you can program in Lisp. You can use it to run programs that interface to components such as LEDs and push-buttons via the I/O pins, read the analogue inputs, and operate external devices via the…
The Comprehensive Guide to Elixir's List Comprehension (2022)
Thank you to Seth Brown, Eric Oestrich, and Kevin Rankin for reviewing this article.
The Future Shape of Ruby Objects
These are the notes for a talk I gave at RubyKaigi 2021, which is why they’re written as if we were talking and going through some slides and code together.
PyPy 1.9 Released
We're pleased to announce the 1.9 release of PyPy. This release brings mostly bugfixes, performance improvements, other small improvements ...
Talking about “types”
My essay “In Search of Types” attempts to be a dispassionate review of some of the different concepts, purposes and attitudes surrounding the word “type” in programming. I imagine that my passions are still rather thinly veiled in places. But in this post I'm going to come out with a more unabashedly ranty take…
Why are we limited to JS in browsers - would a bytecode standard help?
robhu has a good point over here . At the moment we write Javascript in web pages, which is then compiled down by the various JIT methods that Firefox/IE/Webkit use to make it super fast. Seeing as what's run clearly isn't the actual JS itself, but bytecode, why not have a standardised bytecode…
Why did Prolog lose steam? (2010)
Its declarative lunch was partly eaten
Why Perl 6 is different
Let’s be honest. Perl 5, Python, Ruby, they’re almost the same. There are some differences, but when your compare them with C, Java, Haskell or some such they suddenly feel rather superficial. They suitable or unsuitable for pretty much the same tasks, occupying a niche that Perl pioneered: that of a high manipulexity…
How to read C type declarations (2003)
Even relatively new C programmers have no trouble reading simple C declarations such as
Don't Write a Programming Language
It will chew you up and spit you out, and you'll not even complain. I often start new projects at the beginning of the year, around Dec...
On Learning Smalltalk
Summary: In 2021 I learned Smalltalk, mostly using the lovely Pharo implementation. While the syntax of the language is quite nice, it...
State of Valhalla
This is the first of three documents describing the current State of Valhalla. The second is The Language Model ; the third is The JVM Model .
Upcoming Features in Go 1.18
Go 1.18 will be a significant release of the programming language that will contain some major features that I’m excited about. The upcoming version is scheduled for early 2022. The first beta should be out in a month. Let’s take a look at some of the new features that will be available.
Pratt Parsers: Expression Parsing Made Easy (2011)
Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it. Heaps were one, just about the only thing I got out of my truncated CS education. I recently stumbled onto another: Pratt or…
Specter – Clojure API for immutable programming (2017)
After two years of being open source and a lot of development, Specter has reached 1.0. In this po...
Resizable structs in Zig
In this post I will make the case for the concept of a “runtime resizable struct” in Zig. I will then design an API by exploiting Zig’s powerful comptime functionality.
Native reactive spreadsheet in 17 LOC
After the release of our reactive framework a few days ago, we though it would be a good idea to implement the, often mentioned, spreadshee...
APL at Volvo
Hercules is a system used by the Volvo Car Corporation (Volvo) for planning car production. Its main output is the monthly Master Production Schedule (MPS) – a detailed plan on how many cars are to be produced per market, factory and week during the following 13-15 months. Migrating such a comprehensive and vital…
Rocket, Rust Web Framework, v0.2: Managed State and More
Rocket is a web framework for the Rust programming language that makes it simple to write fast web applications without sacrificing flexibility or type safety.
JS is Assembly Language for the Web: Brendan Eich, Crockford, & others comment
UPDATE: Check out the Podcast I did with Erik Meijer on Hanselminutes this week ...
Node v6.6.0
Node.js® is a free, open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that lets developers create servers, web apps, command line tools and scripts.