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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970. I was…
In most systems, integers are stored using a fixed binary representation. It is common to store integers using 32-bit or 64-bit words. You sometimes need to convert it to a string. For example, the integer 12345 might need to be converted to the five characters '12345'. In an earlier blog post, I presented the simpler…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Given that events play such a central role in event-driven architecture, there’s an astonishing lack of agreement on what should be contained in an event. This may be rooted in the fact that, depending on your perspective, events fulfill different purposes.
Inspirations & experiments, mainly about denotative/functional programming in Haskell
Read this Tcl/Tk hands-up/primer to find out how the open-source Command Tool Language toolkit can help you develop cross-plaform tools for Windows, Linux, macOS and even Android.
At Khan Academy we’ve been investigating teaching Computer Science to students in some new and interesting ways. The most interesting aspect of which is that we’re likely going to be teaching them JavaScript as their first language.
I’ve come to accept that I’m just a sucker for shiny nerd things. I use Rust, despite never having had a professional reason to use it in my life. I switched to Linux in my student years and I’ve never looked back since, even though it constantly breaks and I can’t get my Bluetooth headphones to connect. I have a…
Compilers have a hard time optimizing floating point math. Rust has a new API to fix this.
Join me as I update a project through 10 years of Unity editors. Along the way I will talk about my process, Unity tips and tricks, and the tech changes of Unity Engine - several of which I observed firsthand while working at Unity.
This post covers the same material as my !!Con 2024 talk , for which the slides are here .
I was just watching a friend of mine work with git, and he'd always type all the git commands in full, like git status and git push. I realized that he must not be the only one to do so, so I decided to write this quick blog post and encourage everyone to create Huffman coded aliases for the most commonly used...
As the UK's politicians continue to fail to understand what "strong cryptography" or "banning" even mean, I thought I would have a look at how simple strong cryptography can be.
I wrote a short program to generate the Mandelbrot set on the Xerox Alto, a groundbreaking minicomputer from the 1970s. The program, in...
In the first post of the series we've looked at the CPython VM. We've learned that it works by executing a series of instructions called bytecode....
Good development practices for modern Python
One of the great thing about C are the many fairly mature tools in the ecosystem. The bad news however is that most educational materials don't teach them and thus many beginners (and sometimes even experienced) developers have absolutely no awareness that these tools even exists.
I’ve been getting a lot of useful work done with Redis recently. Redis is typically categorised as yet another of those new-fangled NoSQL key/value stores, but if you look closer …
This article describes how to write C programs for the BeagleBone's microcontrollers. The BeagleBone Black is an inexpensive, credit-card...
A high-level overview of Numba and Cython architectures
Earlier this year, I attended CfgMgmtCamp in Ghent and listened to Adam Jacob’s “What if Infrastructure as Code never existed” keynote. Note: I’d like to extend a huge thanks to
