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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
How is tail recursion different from regular recursion? What do continuations have to do with this, what is CPS, and how do trampolines help? This article provides an introduction, with code samples in Python and Clojure.
To learn Rust, I implemented an audio game. There were some things I liked and some things I didn't. Some things were easy and some were hard. And there were plenty of libraries that were a joy to use.
It gives my brain a pleasant thrum to learn new mathematics which mimics the algebra I learned in middle school. Basically this means that the new system has operations with properties that match those of regular numbers as much as possible. Two pretty important operations are addition and multiplication with the…
People who write Ruby programs want to use metaprogramming. It’s part of what makes the language what it is. But in existing implementations of Ruby, metaprogramming is slow. My work focused on making it fast, providing fast tooling for Ruby programmers, and fast support for legacy C extensions.
Checked exceptions have always been a controversial feature of the Java language.
Cache all the things. How React Compiler works under-the-hood.
Recently, we had a discussion in our team about undefined behaviour (UB) in C. For those unfamiliar: We say that a program has undefined behaviour when we write code where the language specification doesn't define what should happen during execution. That means compilers can do whatever they like if they encounter…
There’s a certain community in tech that’s very vocal about their preference toward native apps. I share that sentiment, yet sometimes people take this …
Something I miss after emigrating from the UK to the USA is the using the name of a yeast extract based spread as an adjective. To describe something as “marmite”
Designing a language, types first
Many (maybe most) of us Software Engineers are deeply involved in projects where UI and UX are very important concerns (or at least they should be). Throughout the short history of our profession, we
The keys to debate effectively as a software developer and therefore bringing value to yourself and your company.
I will never stop dying on this hill
Modern processors are superscalar, meaning that they can execute many instructions at once. For example, some processors can retire four or six instructions per cycle. Furthermore, many of these processors can initiate instructions out-of-order: they can start working on instructions that appear much later in the…
Fifteen years ago Python’s GIL wasn’t a big issue. Concurrency was something dismissed as probably unnecessary. What people really was needed was a faster interpreter, after all, who had more than one CPU? But, slowly, as the requirement for concurrency increased, the problems with the GIL increased.
On October 29, 2018 Lion Air Flight 610, a 737 MAX 8 flight from Jakarta, Indonesia to Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia, crashed into the sea 13…
Recently there have been heated complaints that the culture of programming unfairly excludes some groups. They want to join the programming elite and get a spot at the startup trough. More power to…
I've been using Elm since about one year back now. At the start of 2021 I began working with a client that had an existing Elm frontend code base and an early stage backend built in Elixir and Phoenix. This post will be about my experiences running face first into Elm. I'll be vague on some details as I can't share…
Creating application binaries for Linux that run on a wide range of distributions is a bit tricky, as different distributions ship different versions of various system libraries. These are usually backwards compatible, but not forwards compatible, so programs linked against older versions of the libraries also work…
The classic ed editor is a really good example of a sparse, minimal, standard Unix tool that does one thing, and does it well. Because there are so many good screen-oriented editors for Unix, there’s seldom very much call for using ed , unless you’re working on very old or very limited hardware that won’t run anything…
This is a short response to the recently announced Go 2 generics draft proposals
How I learned to stop worrying and love the code Photo by MipsyRetro/Flickr remix by Jason Reed I’m learning to code. I’ve been on again off again with it for about two years now. But I've only …
