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

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781

Lisping at JPL (2002)

This is the story of the rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab as told from my personal (and highly biased) point of view. I am not writing in my official capacity as an employee of JPL, nor am I in any way representing the official position of JPL. (This will become rather obvious shortly.)

782

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…

786

How Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn't

For those who don’t follow Swift’s development, ABI stability has been one of its most ambitious projects and possibly it’s defining feature, and it finally shipped in Swift 5 . The result is something I find endlessly fascinating, because I think Swift has pushed the notion of ABI stability farther than any language…

792

Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?

On StackExchange, someone asks why programmers talk about “calling” a function. Several possible allusions spring to mind: Calling a function is like calling on a friend — we go, we stay a while, we come back. Calling a function is like calling for a servant — a summoning to perform a task. Calling a function is like…

794

Async Ruby

Async Ruby is a powerful and highly scalable concurrency feature. It's available today, it's production-ready, and it's an awesome addition to Ruby language!

795

Tcl/Tk 9.1

Tcl/Tk 9.1.0 is the current development work on Tcl and Tk, aiming toward stable releases in September 2026. They add new features and interfaces to the foundation of Tcl/Tk 9.0.

796

The Unix Philosophy and Elixir as an Alternative to Go

If you’ve done web programming for any length of time, you might too feel like we are at the start of some new era. For years, we’ve been using frameworks like Django and Rails in languages like Python and Ruby and PHP which use the old request-response cycle (for lack of a better term). Basically, a request comes…

801

“Why not just use Lean?”

I have been told that when proposing to formalise mathematics these days, you have to explain why you are not using Lean. And that reminds me why I left the dependent-typed world 40 years ago: its cultism, insularity and conformity. Lean is a great language with good tools, a large library and a huge, enthusiastic…

802

D as a C Replacement

Sircmpwn (the main developer behind the Sway Wayland compositor ) recently wrote a blog post about how he thinks Rust is not a good C replacement . I don’t know if he’d like the D programming language either, but it’s become a C replacement for me.

803

Pharo 11

Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment focused on simplicity and immediate feedback.

805

AWS' Sponsorship of the Rust Project

We’re really excited to announce that AWS is sponsoring the Rust programming language! Rust is designed for writing and maintaining fast, reliable, and efficient code. It has seen considerable uptake since its first stable release four years ago, with companies like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla all using Rust. Rust…