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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 327 posts.

2024
32

Programming languages that blew my mind (2023)

I’ve been a programmer since the age of 8, and some kind of developer for most of my life. Throughout my life as a coder, both hobbyist and professional, I’ve learnt plenty of programming languages that felt like cookie-cutter clones of each other, but also a few programming languages that changed the way I looked at…

33

Rewriting Rust

The Rust programming language feels like a first generation product. You know what I mean. Like the first iPhone - which was amazing by the way. They made an entire operating system around multitouch. A smart phone with no keyboard. And a working web browser. Within a few months, we

35

A Tour of the Lisps

2023 seems to have been the year where I "made the rounds" of a number of major Lisps. There were several elements that lead to this. Firstly must have been my exposure to Elixir in 2022, which introduced me to the idea of debugging live systems and "staying in your program". Secondly must have been my chief complaint…

40

A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#

OK, so C# doesn’t share the Rust concept of “borrowing,” so it wouldn’t technically be correct to call this “borrow checking,” but in practice when people talk about “Rust’s borrow checker” they’re talking about all of the static analysis Rust does to ensure memory safety, for which I think this qualifies.

46

scrapscript.py

Scrapscript is a small, pure, functional, content-addressable, network-first programming language. It’s designed to allow creating small, simply shareable programs. The language was created by Taylor Troesh and the main implementation was created by me and Chris.

48

I learned Haskell in just 15 years

Haskell is a programming language invented sometime in the 20th century by Scottish logicians as a prank. ¹ Fifteen years or so ago, for reasons I can no longer remotely recall, I started learning Haskell. Now, I have finally written a useful program in Haskell, and I am pretty sure I can do it again, if I ever need…

52

Speeding up Ruby by rewriting C in Ruby

There is a recent language comparison repo which has been getting shared a lot. In it, CRuby was the third slowest option, only beating out R and Python. The repo author, @BenjDicken, created a fun visualization of each language’s performance. Here’s one of the visualizations, which shows Ruby as the third slowest…

55

The Rust calling convention we deserve

I will often say that the so-called “C ABI” is a very bad one, and a relatively unimaginative one when it comes to passing complicated types effectively. A lot of people ask me “ok, what would you use instead”, and I just point them to the Go register ABI , but it seems most people have trouble filling in the gaps of…

59

Game Programming in Prolog

This article explains how a game can be made in Prolog by leveraging the hidden power of logic programming. Inspired by the elegance of data-driven design and declarative programming paradigms, I will be explaining a new way of designing game rules which can at the same time be used as the source code of the gameplay…