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

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4326

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…

4332

Scala’s Types of Types

This blog post came into being after a few discussions about Types in Scala after some of JavaOne’s parties in 2013. After those discussions I figured that many questions are often repeated by different people, during their learning of Scala. I though that we didn’t have a full list of all tricks what we can to with…

4335

How to Name Clojure Functions

This is a guide on naming Clojure functions. There are exceptions to every rule. When you’re defining something based on natural language, there are more exceptions than rules. I break these rules more often than I follow them. This guide is just a starting point for thinking about how to name things.

4341

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 …

4342

Emacs Bytecode Internals (2014)

Byte-code compilation is an underdocumented — and in the case of the recent lexical binding updates, undocumented — part of Emacs. Most users know that Elisp is usually compiled into a byte-code saved to .elc files, and that byte-code loads and runs faster than uncompiled Elisp. That’s all users really need to know…

4346

Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)

Lisp has done quite well over the last ten years: becoming nearly standardized, forming the basis of a commercial sector, achieving excellent performance, having good environments, able to deliver applications. Yet the Lisp community has failed to do as well as it could have. In this paper I look at the successes, the…