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

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511

Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell

For work-related reasons, I had to recently get up to speed on programming in Haskell. Before that, I had very little actual experience with the language, clocking probably at less than a thousand lines of working code over a couple of years. Nothing impressive either: some wrapper script here, some experimental…

512

Racket is 25

posted by Matthias Felleisen and Matthew Flatt The First Thoughts [Matthias]: Wednesday 25 January 1995: POPL used to be a Monday-through-Wednesday-noon affair. Cormac Flanagan presented his future paper there (a static analysis on how to eliminate i...

518

Never create Ruby strings longer than 23 characters

Obviously this is an utterly preposterous statement: it’s hard to think of a more ridiculous and esoteric coding requirement. I can just imagine all sorts of amusing conversations with designers and business sponsors: “No... the size of this <input> field should be 23... 24 is just too long!” Or: “We need to explain…

522

A Programming Language Underdog

As devs in late 2018, we’ve got lots of programming language choices. Mainstream ones alone, there’s about a dozen or so of them. They’re all awesome. As you wander a bit further down the obscurity path, you’ll find languages like elm , elixir , purescript , and reason . And just past those, you’ll find nim .

524

Dear sir, you have built a compiler

I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…

530

I Built a Lisp Compiler

I’m very proud to announce the completion of my first programming language compiler! Malcc is an incremental and ahead-of-time lisp compiler written in C. This is the story of my progress over the years and what I learned in the process. An alternate title for this post is: “How to Write a Compiler in Ten Years or…

533

Callbacks are imperative, promises are functional

You will often hear it said that JavaScript is a ‘functional’ programming language. It is described as such simply because functions are first-class values: many other features that define functional programming – immutable data, preference for recursion over looping, algebraic type systems, avoidance of side effects…

535

Rust and Go

I’ve been spending a bit of my time playing around with new languages — in particular, Rust has captured my imagination. The bulk of the…

536

A final proposal for Rust await syntax

This is an announcement regarding the resolution of the syntax for the await operator in Rust. This is one of the last major unresolved questions blocking the stabilization of the async/await feature, a feature which will enable many more people to write non-blocking network services in Rust. This post contains…

538

Go Slices Are Fat Pointers

One of the frequent challenges in C is that pointers are nothing but a memory address. A callee who is passed a pointer doesn’t truly know anything other than the type of object being pointed at, which says some things about alignment and how that pointer can be used… maybe. If it’s a pointer to void ( void * ) then…