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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 375 posts.
Smalltalk was the second major influence on Ruby's design. A different kind of influence, since almost nothing of Smalltalk's syntax made into Ruby. But many of the details of how objects work are directly inspired by Smalltalk, including the idea that every piece of data is part of the object system.
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
The heart of Rust borrow-checking is this: when a borrow is taken, and until it expires, access to the borrowed place is restricted. For example you may not read from a place while it is mutably borrowed.
Note: Everything that follows is purely my personal opinion as an individual. It should not be seen as any sort of policy of the Meson buil...
I recently took some time to try Gleam, the type-safe language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. For a couple of weeks, I used it to build a little feed aggregator. These are my notes.
[The wordpress markdown inclusion does a very bad job, it seems, there have been some idiotic formatting errors. I hope that these are fixed, now.] A years-long effort led by Kayvan Memarian and Pe…
If you know one thing about me, it is that I love working on the Rust compiler. Some people kayak, travel or play guitar - and I stare at assembly, trying to figure out what I broke.
I read a good post by one of the authors of the Isabelle theorem prover, that got me thinking. The author, Lawrence Paulson, observed that most math proofs are trivial, but writing them (preferably with a proof assistant) is a worthwhile activity, for reasons similar to safety checklists - “Not every obvious statement…
If you’ve read anything about compilers in the last two decades or so, you have almost certainly heard of SSA compilers , a popular architecture featured in many optimizing compilers, including ahead-of-time compilers such as LLVM, GCC, Go, CUDA (and various shader compilers), Swift 1 , and MSVC 2 , and just-in-time…
The most exciting part of Programming Languages (PL) research for me has always been in Programming Language Design.
Lead programmer talks Lua’s flexibility, challenges, and integration with Defold game engine after 60k lines of code in Craftomation 101.
Here’s a little idiom that I haven’t really seen discussed anywhere, that I think makes Rust code much cleaner and more robust.
I just think it's neat!
TIL: `satisfies` is my favorite TypeScript keyword
In my book Understanding the Odin Programming Language I wrote that “Odin incorporates some of my favorite C best practices, straight into the language”. But I didn’t really elaborate on the details. Let’s do that here! This brings me to talking a bit about a previous job I had. Back in 2021 I worked at a place called…
I had a vague idea that closures could have a variety of performance implications; I did not believe that so many of the chosen and potential designs for C and C++ extensions ones, however, were so…
Developing a Boids program from scratch without restarting it.
Execute sandboxed Lua code on the BEAM VM using Luerl
Holy fucking shit did this suck 1 . There is a comments section below. Give your eulogy for that piece of shit sorcerous incantation there or wherever else.
Issue warnings about uses of deep reflection to mutate final fields. These warnings aim to prepare developers for a future release that ensures integrity by default by restricting final field mutation, which will make Java programs safer and potentially faster. Application developers can avoid both current warnings…
Why I reach for Zig first for my CLI tools lately
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
This small ebook is here to teach you a programming language called Forth. Forth is a language unlike most others. It’s not functional or object oriented, it doesn’t have type-checking, and it basically has zero syntax. It was written in the 70s, but is still used today for certain applications .
k is a family of concise, fast vector-oriented languages designed by Arthur Whitney . Calling k a “family” is deliberate; there is no single definitive k, but instead a sequence of slightly incompatible versions. If you decide to stick with k, you’ll see mentions of k4 , k5 etc. Exactly what those numbers mean aren’t…
Class website here: https://kmicinski.com/cis531-f25
Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a medium of expression that happens to execute on a computer.
This is a personal pick of the most interesting projects, tools, libraries and articles that popped-up in Common Lisp land in the last two years.Newcomers might not realize how the Common Lisp ecosystem, though stable in many ways, actually evolves, sharpens, tries new solutions, proposes new tools, ships new…
The compiler is a powerful tool, yet many developers have a painful relationship with it. Can we do better?
