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

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1653

Ruby's Creed

Every programming language has some fundamental idea(s) that drives its design and evolution. For Haskell that’s functional purity and state-of-the-art static typing, for Erlang that’s distributed programming and fault tolerance, for Clojure that’s simplicity and stability. What all these examples have in common is…

1654

Some C habits I employ for the modern day

Despite it being the first “proper” programming language I learned—by reading K&R front-to-back no less—I don’t write C too terribly often nowadays. Playing resonite has gotten me into writing a load of C# for modding the game, and most of what I do day-to-day is automating the tedium on my computer, which gets…

1656

The CPython Bytecode Compiler Is Dumb

Due to sheer coincidence of several unrelated tasks converging on Python at work, I recently needed to brush up on my Python skills. So far for me, Python has been little more than a fancy extension language for BeautifulSoup , though I also used it to participate in the recent tradition of writing one’s own static…

1657

Writing a website in Rust

I wanted to create a website for a personal project. This is usually the great opportunity to learn - no time pressure, no external requirements, etc. That meant I could choose the language I wanted to try out in anger (Rust) and take it for a spin. Here’s a short summary of the experience.

1659

Go’s hidden pragmas

This is an article about compiler directives; or as they are commonly known, pragmas. It’s derived from a talk of a similar name that I gave last year at GopherChina in Shanghai.

1661

Objectivist C

Although academic computer scientists have generally dismissed Objectivist-C, it has a zealous following among self-taught programmers and college sophomores.

1667

Why Python Is Slow: Looking Under the Hood

When I teach courses on Python for scientific computing, I make this point very early in the course, and tell the students why: it boils down to Python being a dynamically typed, interpreted language, where values are stored not in dense buffers but in scattered objects. And then I talk about how to get around this by…

1677

Ruby 3.1.0 Preview 1

Since Ruby 2.6 introduced MJIT in 2018 , its performance greatly improved, and finally we achieved Ruby3x3 last year . But even though Optcarrot has shown impressive speedups, the JIT hasn’t benefited real world business applications.