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

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1743

Zero-Overhead Tree Processing with the Visitor Pattern

The Visitor Pattern is one of the most mis-understood of the classic design patterns. While it has a reputation as a slightly roundabout technique for doing simple processing on simple trees, it is actually an advanced tool for a specific use case: flexible, streaming, zero-overhead processing of complex data…

1745

Lisp in Your Language

I'm a fan of Lisp programming languages, but there's an incredible conceptual elegance that struggles to materialise as readable elegance for many unfamiliar programmers. The underlying concepts are incredibly simple, but the learning curve can represent a disproportionate challenge.

1754

Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool

Like the blip of an intro on the front page says, my degree was originally in music. My running joke as a web dev is that neither has meaningfully required me to count past 32. And while my main concentration was vocals, I've since realized I should probably stop strictly calling this a nontechnical field, because my…

1764

Extending Python with Rust

Sometimes a pure Python script can't just deliver the performance we need. When that's the case we have to resort to writing our logic in a "fast" compiled language like C or Rust and expose the function with through a Python module. This way we get the best of both worlds. Today I focus on how to use Rust for writing…

1767

Elm in the Real World

Elm is a beginner friendly functional reactive programming language for building web frontend. Choosing Elm for a customer project made my job nicer than ever and helped maintain project velocity during months of development.

1769

Why static languages suffer from complexity

People in the programming language design community strive to make their languages more expressive, with a strong type system, mainly to increase ergonomics by avoiding code duplication in final software; however, the more expressive their languages become, the more abruptly duplication penetrates the language itself.