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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 5,634 posts.

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3902

R7RS versus R6RS (2018)

InPhase asked today on #scheme about the R7RS vs R6RS debate. I followed the original debate closely and have experience both using and implementing R6RS. I also recently added R7RS support in Akku.scm 0.3.0, so I feel like I can weigh in on this. It’s a topic that many feel passionately about, and I’m also firmly on…

3903

The Joy of Erlang; Or, How to Ride a Toruk (2011)

In the movie Avatar , there’s this big badass bird-brained pterodactyl thing called a Toruk that the main character must learn to ride in order to regain the trust of the blue people. As a general rule, Toruks do not like to be ridden, but if you fight one, subdue it, and then link your Blue Man ponytail to the…

3905

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…

3910

Zig 0.6.0 Release Notes

Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust , optimal , and reusable software. With special thanks to many generous sponsors , the Zig project is financially sustainable and currently supports one full-time developer . Let's reboot systems programming.

3911

A look back on OCaml since 2011

A look back on OCaml since 2011 As you already know if you’ve read our last blogpost, we have updated our OCaml cheat sheets starting with the language and stdlib ones. We know some of you have students to initiate in September and we wanted these sheets to be ready for the start of the school yea...

3915

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

3917

Learning Lean: Part 1

Motivation I’ve been captivated by the recent movement to popularize mathematics formalization through the Lean theorem prover, and this year I’m diving deeper into learning it. For those unfamiliar with this revolution, I highly recommend watching Kevin Buzzard’s talks on YouTube for an overview of why formal…

3918

Debugging Lisp, Part 5

This post is for all of the miscellaneous features that arent large enough to get their own individual posts. If you havent read all of them, here are the links to the previous posts on recompilation, inspection, class redefinition, and restarts. One somewhat obscure tool for debugging is SBCLs trace. SBCLs trace goes…

3923

Why C++ Is Not "Back"

There are plenty of excellent developers I know today that still use C++ and teach others how to use it and there is nothing at all wrong with that. So what is the problem then? Why is C++ not "back"?

3924

Bitten by Unicode

One product of mine takes reports that come in as a table that’s been exported to PDF, which means text extraction. For dollar figures I find a prefixed dollar symbol and convert the number following it into a float . If there’s a hyphen in addition to the dollar symbol, it’s negative.

3928

An Intuition for Lisp Syntax

Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets ! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany.