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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 181 posts.

2012
161

Graham’s Guide to Learning Scala

From The Archives: This article is one of the all-time most popular posts from my previous blog Graham Hacking Scala. I thought it worth updating and re-printing it here. It’s a pretty widely-accepted view that, as a programmer, learning new … Continue reading →

163

Rust's Object System

On the rust-dev mailing list, someone pointed out another “BitC retrospective” post by Jonathon Shapiro concerning typeclasses . The Rust object system provides interesting solutions to some of the problems he raises. We also manage to combine traditional class-oriented OOP with Haskell’s type classes in a way that…

165

An Introduction to Condition Handling for Non-Lispers

One of Common Lisp’s more advanced features is its condition handling system, which is a powerful generalisation of other languages’ exception handling systems. I first became aware of condition handling from Peter Seibel’s Practical Common Lisp , chapter 19 . But if I’m honest I’ve only very recently understood what…

166

C Programming Puzzlers

These questions originally appeared as an article on programmersheaven.com , written by Ashok K. Pathak, a researcher at Bharat Electronics Limited (CRL), Ghaziabad. They are reproduced here with minor modifications.

169

The Caves of Clojure

Lately I've had an urge to start playing a few games again, namely Nethack and Dwarf Fortress (the latter being triggered by this book ). Aside from being incredibly fun, they also made me want to play around with writing a roguelike game of my own.

172

Adding a new statement to Python

This article is an attempt to better understand how the front-end of Python works. Just reading documentation and source code may be a bit boring, so I'm taking a hands-on approach here: I'm going to add an until statement to Python.

175

Reader Q&A: What about VC++ and C99?

I occasionally get asked about whether, or how well, Visual C++ supports C99. This week, I just posted two replies to this questions on UserVoice (merged below). Last fall, I also answered it in an…

176

research!rsc: The Generic Dilemma

Generic data structures (vectors, queues, maps, trees, and so on) seem to be the hot topic if you are evaluating a new language. One of the most frequent questions we've had about Go is where the generics are. It seems like there are three basic approaches to generics:

178

Boolean Blindness

I hate Booleans! But isn’t everything “just bits”? Aren’t computers built from gates? And aren’t gates just the logical connectives? How can a Computer Scientist p…