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

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755

Why SICP Matters

In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them:

761

State of the Common Lisp ecosystem, 2020

This is a description of the Common Lisp ecosystem, as of January, 2021, from the perspective of a user and contributor.The purpose of this article is both to give an overview of the ecosystem, and to help drive consolidation in each domain.Each application domain has recommendations for consolidating that part of the…

763

Learn Haskell Fast and Hard

I really believe all developers should learn Haskell. I don’t think everyone needs to be super Haskell ninjas, but they should at least discover what Haskell has to offer. Learning Haskell opens your mind.

766

Why Not Rust?

I've recently read an article criticizing Rust, and, while it made a bunch of good points, I didn't enjoy it --- it was an easy to argue with piece. In general, I feel that I can't recommend an article criticizing Rust. This is a shame --- confronting drawbacks is important, and debunking low effort/miss informed…

767

The .NET Language Strategy

The .NET Language Strategy I am constantly aware of the enormous impact our language investments have on so many people’s daily lives. Our languages are a huge strength of the .NET platform, and a primary factor in people choosing to bet on it – and stay on it. I’ve been here on the .NET languages […]

771

Why is Rust difficult?

Rust is considered difficult to learn by many people. Indeed, when I learned it, I considered it to be the hardest programming language up to that time I’ve met. And that says something, since I have a habit of learning whatever language I find interesting. Looking back, I’m not sure I was correct, C++ is probably…

774

PHP Addiction

I wrote Tumblr, Instapaper, and Second Crack in PHP. I continue to use it because I know it extremely well, it’s very easy to use and deploy, and it’s nearly maintenance-free on servers. When you’re a programmer forced to also be your own sysadmin, that’s very attractive.

776

“I Could Rewrite Curl”

Collected quotes and snippets from people publicly sneezing off or belittling what curl is, explaining how easy it would be to make a replacement in no time with no effort or generally not being very helpful. These are statements made seriously. For all I know, they were not ironic. If you find others to add ……