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Dynamic types have the potential to be more than "no static types"
They have potential to be more than "no static types", but that hasn't happened.
Topics /
Programming Languages
The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 384 posts.
302
From TypeScript to ReScript
Rewriting the Inhyped.com React frontend in ReScript brought a sound type system and easy JS interop, at the cost of a small community.
303
Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)
Notable programmers describe understanding and coding in LISP as a semi-religious experience. What gives the language this power?
304
I wrote a Ruby extension in Zig
Just my website. Some Elixir, some Ruby, some more exotic languages and general thoughts on tech.
305
Failing in Haskell
I’m a Haskell failure, don’t tell anyone! Recently I encountered some dubious error handling code. Not only was it failing, it was failing WRONG 1. This frus
306
WebAssembly back end merged into GHC
Announcing the GHC WebAssembly backend – present and future
307
Worst practices are viral for the wrong reasons (2014)
Perverse incentives surrounding best practices
308
We automatically fixed thousands of Ruby 2.7 deprecation warnings
The upgrade to Ruby 2.7 for GitLab involved thousands of deprecation warnings across hundreds of files. Here's how we fixed most of them.
309
A few examples of Lisp code typography (2013)
The code formatting and typography is frequent, controversial but probably unavoidable topic among programmers. This document contains some representative and possibly, relevant examples of the Lisp code.
310
A crash course in Python “comprehensions” and “generators”
Master them in 20 minutes. Use them every day.
311
Why APL is worth knowing
Let me show you characteristics of APL that will influence your understanding of programming concepts and the way you use other languages.
312
Async Rust: Panics vs. Cancellation
One of the things people often complain about when doing Async Rust is cancellation. This has always been a bit confusing to me, because it seems to me that async cancellation should feel a lot like panics in practice, and people don’t complain about panics very often (though they do sometimes). This post is the start…
313
The long strange trip to Java (1996)
I've debated with myself for several years about whether or not to write this down. After so much time has passed, the facts are confused, 20/20 hindsight creeps in, and selective memory plays a role in how fairly I can portray the events. Many reporters have asked me my version of these past few years, several have…
314
Programming with Nothing
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
315
Introduction to Haskell Typeclasses
In this article, we introduce you to typeclasses in Haskell: what they are, how they can be used, and how to define your own instances of typeclasses.
316
Reasons why Fortran is still used (2021)
Fortran is a language that is specialized for high-performance computing. Believe it or not, it's still alive and evolving.
317
Arc and Mutex in Rust
When writing concurrent Rust you will encounter Arc and Mutex types sooner or later. And although Mutex might already sound familiar as it's a concept known in many languages, chances are you haven't heard about Arc before Rust. What's more, you can't fully understand these concepts without tying them to the ownership…
318
Memories: Edinburgh ML to Standard ML
Dave MacQueen (with Robert Harper and John Reppy) has written a 100-page History of Standard ML . Here I offer my brief, personal and utterly subjective impressions of its early days, up to the deeply unfortunate schism that created what was then called Caml . Standard ML was a tragic missed opportunity. But even…
319
The Y Combinator in Go with generics
A few years ago I've written in some detail about the Y combinator, including implementations in Clojure and Python.
320
What I wish I knew when learning OCaml (2018)
This is a poorly structured list of common questions and answers about OCaml I had to ask myself or have been asked often.
321
Learning a new language, or how I gained familiarity with Go
How I've eased into a new language, Go, as a Senior Software Engineer, and some initial thoughts on the language.
322
Faster Sorting with Go Generics
Recently, a new set of sorting functions has landed in Go's golang.org/x/exp/slices package [1] . These functions leverage Go generics to provide a more ergonomic API for sorting (without requiring users to implement sort.Interface ), and also deliver a nice performance improvement, as the CL demonstrates.
323
Crystal 1.5
We are delivering a new release with several bugfixes and improvements. Below we list the most important or interesting changes, without mentioning several bugfixes and smaller enhancements. For more details, visit the changelog. Breaking changes are marked with ⚠️.
324
They Called It LISP for a Reason: List Processing (2005)
Lists play an important role in Lisp--for reasons both historical and practical. Historically, lists were Lisp's original composite data type, though it has been decades since they were its only such data type. These days, a Common Lisp programmer is as likely to use a vector, a hash table, or a user-defined class or…
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DockYard R&D: FireFly Optimizes Your Elixir Compilation
Firefly is an alternative compiler to BEAM, introducing new levels of efficiency and speed for compiling Elixir applications.
327
Loopr: A Loop/Reduction Macro for Clojure
I write a lot of reductions: loops that combine every element from a collection in some way. For example, summing a vector of integers:
328
Babashka Clojure nREPL as a system interface
Dmitri's blog about programming, Clojure, and software development
329
My Elm Experience
I've been using Elm since about one year back now. At the start of 2021 I began working with a client that had an existing Elm frontend code base and an early stage backend built in Elixir and Phoenix. This post will be about my experiences running face first into Elm. I'll be vague on some details as I can't share…
330
Binary Lambda Calculus (2020)
Binary lambda calculus ( BLC ) is a minimal, pure functional programming language invented by John Tromp in 2004, 1 based on a binary encoding of the untyped lambda calculus in De Bruijn index notation.