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

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2283

Kotlin 1.0.5 is here

We're happy to announce that we've just released Kotlin 1.0.5, which continues the series of bugfix and tooling updates for Kotlin 1.0. We'd like to thank our external contributors whose pull request

2288

What causes Ruby memory bloat?

Ruby apps can use a lot of memory. But why? Various people in the community attribute it to memory fragmentation, and provide two “hacky” solutions. Dissatisfied by the current explanations and provided solutions, I set out on a journey to discover the deeper truth and to find better solutions.

2293

What is Hindley-Milner and why is it cool? (2008)

Anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at the vast menagerie of programming languages should have at least heard the phrase "Hindley-Milner". F#, one of the most promising languages ever to emerge from the forbidding depths of Microsoft Research, makes use of this mysterious algorithm, as do Haskell, OCaml and ML…

2300

What Made Lisp Different (2002)

(This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds .) When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was Fortran . Lisp embodied nine new ideas:

2302

Evolving Scala

There is always ongoing discussion about the future direction of the Scala language. How fast should it move? What needs to be improved? Should the language change at all? This article discusses how Scala must keep evolving , why that evolution is necessary, and what directions we expect that evolution to take. We…

2306

Visual Basic Turns 25

That’s right! Today marks the 25th (“Silver Anniversary”) since VB first debuted to the world. It seems like just yesterday I’d only been at Microsoft a little over a year when VB turned 20. Looking back at the progress of 5 years—a complete revamp of the IDE and debugger, a trove of new language features, […]