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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 227 posts.
About Python 3
Python community, friends, fellow developers, we need to talk. On December 3rd, 2008 Python 3.0 was first released. At the time it was widely said that Python 3 adoption was going to be a long process, it was referred to as a five year process. We’ve just passed the five year mark.
Ruby 2.0.0 Released
We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 2.0.0-p0.
Announcing Topaz: A New Ruby
I’m extraordinarily pleased to today announce Topaz, a project I started 10 months ago, to create a brand new implementation of the Ruby programming language (version 1.9.3).
Booting to Rust
A couple nights ago I was looking over the UEFI spec, and I realized it shouldn't be too hard to write UEFI applications in Rust. It turns out, you can, and her…
Scala – 1 Star – Would Not Program Again
With Scala you feel smart having just got something to work in a beautiful way but when you look around the room to tell your clojure colleague how clever you are, you notice he left 3 hours ago and there is a post-it saying use a Map. Daniel Worthington-Bodart
Callbacks are imperative, promises are functional
You will often hear it said that JavaScript is a ‘functional’ programming language. It is described as such simply because functions are first-class values: many other features that define functional programming – immutable data, preference for recursion over looping, algebraic type systems, avoidance of side effects…
Four years of Go
Happy 4th birthday, Go!
Learning JavaScript - my experience and advice
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Stunned by Go
The original working title for this post was "Go is hostile to developers". This was named at a time of extreme frustration, and it didn't ...
Go 1.2 is released
Go 1.2 adds test coverage results, goroutine preemption, and more.
LLVM Intermediate Representation is better than assembly
The crucial part is IR. It's a common language that sits between the high-level program and the low-level backend . IR is used to express high level concepts and is specific enough that any backend can produce a fast machine code.
Why SICP Matters
In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them:
Learn Haskell Fast and Hard
I really believe all developers should learn Haskell. I don’t think everyone needs to be super Haskell ninjas, but they should at least discover what Haskell has to offer. Learning Haskell opens your mind.
The string type is broken
My previous article, “We don’t need a string type“, caused a bit of stir. Though the feedback is mixed, there is a common theme of a string being a useful feature. After doing a bit more research I can determine only one thing: most current string types are broken! Many of us believe our strings […]
Asm.js in Firefox Nightly
I’m happy to announce that OdinMonkey, an asm.js optimization module for Firefox’s JavaScript engine, is now in Nightly builds and will ship with Firefox 22 in June.
Learn C
I started learning Objective-C about three years ago while I was studying music in Nashville, TN. Some time during high school, I had poked around in C++, but I didn’t understand it. By college, I …
PyPy 2.0 Released
We're pleased to announce PyPy 2.0. This is a stable release that brings a swath of bugfixes, small performance improvements and compatibil...
Why Asm.js Bothers Me
Please note that this post expresses my personal opinion and mine alone, not those of my employer or my teammates.
Edward C++Hands
I’ve been looking for a good analogy of what programming in C++ feels like and I remembered this 1990 Tim Burton movie, Edward Scissorhands. It’s a darker version of Pinocchio, shot in …
When Haskell Is Not faster than C
This article is in response to an earlier one comparing Haskell and C, which made the claim that Haskell beats out C when it comes to speed. On a Hacker News thread I made the bold claim that the C code is rife with problems and that it is tempting to fix it.
Firefox Nightly Gets New Baseline JIT Compiler
This wednesday we landed the baseline compiler on Firefox nightly. After six months of work from start to finish, we are finally able to merge ...