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

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5378

Secret Perl Operators

I love Perl because of its expressiveness. You can write incredible code and it feels just so natural compared to other languages. Here are 8 secret Perl operators that I often use. Only one of them is a real operator (first one). The others are syntactic tricks that make them look like operators but they are not…

5386

Jim Hugunin leaves Microsoft and IronPython

Today marks the end of a crazy six year journey for me at Microsoft. I clearly remember my brutal first 8 months at this company as I worked with lawyers, marketing folks and execs to figure out if and how we could release IronPython as an open source project from Microsoft. The final approval for that release came…

5390

The Python IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions

A question is infrequently answered either because few people know the answer or because it concerns an obscure, subtle point (but a point that may be crucial to you). I thought I had invented the term for my Java IAQ , but it also shows up at the very informative About.com Urban Legends site. There are lots of Python…

5392

The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)

[This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he…

5397

Clojure.rb

Call me crazy, but it seems that there is a large influx of Ruby programmers exploring the Clojure programming language. Based on the results of Chas Emerick’s great State of Clojure - Summer 2010 survey , 17% of surveyed Clojure users come from a Ruby background. Based on observed trends, I expect that percentage to…

5398

Ruby 2.0 Refinements in Practice

First Shugo announced them at RubyKaigi. Then Matz showed some improved syntax at RubyConf. But what are refinements [http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4085] all about, and what would they be used for? The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby