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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 313 posts.

2014
186

Why I find IEEE 754 frustrating

Programming languages new (Java) and old (Fortran), and their compilers, still lack competent support for features of IEEE 754 so painstakingly provided by practically all hardware nowadays. […] Programmers seem unaware that IEEE 754 is a standard for their programming environment, not just for hardware. William Kahan

190

Why CoffeeScript Isn't the Answer

CoffeeScript is an open source project that provides a new syntax for JavaScript. I have to say that I have a lot of respect for CoffeeScript and it got a lot of things right. The “golden rule” of CoffeeScript is “It’s just JavaScript” . That means there is a straightforward equivalent to every line of CoffeeScript…

191

Things that make Go fast

Anthony Starks has remixed my original Google Present based slides using his fantastic Deck presentation tool. You can check out his remix over on his blog, mindchunk.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/remixing-with-deck .

195

Fun with Lisp: Programming the NES (2012)

"Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul." -John Carmack When the complexity of modern computing gets fatiguing, I look back to the simpler machines of my childhood. I grew up surrounded by various 8-bit and 16-bit machines (most of them already a few years outdated at the time),…

197

Teenage Haskell

I’ve been inspired by the efforts of others (Chris Smith, Manuel Chakravarty) to try teaching children haskell as a first experience of programming. Haskell has a reputation of being a "…

203

Types Are The Truth

In Chapter 9 of Types and Programming Languages , Pierce presents his exposition of the Simply typed Lambda-Calculus. It is a truly awesome chapter - each subsection in succession constructs a rich and very well detailed system of computation and Pierce is a master of precision, guiding the reader through the maze of…

205

What's wrong with statistics in Julia?

Introduction Link to heading Several months ago, I promised to write an updated version of my old post, “The State of Statistics in Julia”, that would describe how Julia’s support for statistical computing has evolved since December 2012. I’ve kept putting off writing that post for several reasons, but the most…