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Programming Languages

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

2020
367

REBOL Oneliners

One-liners are like Haiku poetry. Not always practical, not always readable, they are fun to write. As with any art, some are better than others, but from time-to-time, a true gem pops up.

368

Why the Sorbet type checker is fast

This is the second in an indefinite series of posts about things that I think went well in the Sorbet project. The previous one covered our testing approach. Sorbet is fast. Numerous of our early users commented specifically on how fast it was, and how much they appreciated this speed. Our informal benchmarks on…

374

Static Analysis

Nim is in an excellent position to “get married” with static analysis, and it doesn’t have to be based on some intermediate representation but can achieve a solution more similar to Spark.

376

Smalltalk-87

In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got

385

Dave Prosser's C Preprocessing Algorithm (2006)

For about five years I've been trying to implement a fully conforming C preprocessor for the front end of the CScout refactoring browser. I've found this to be a fiendishly difficult task. Although what I have written can correctly process million-line real-life projects, every once in a while I come across a…

389

Types as axioms, or: playing god with static types

A common perspective is that types are restrictions . Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making…