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Draculark: Mudlarking and vampire hunting game in APL for the Commodore SuperPET
Mudlark on the River Thames foreshore by day, then hunt vampires at Carfax Abbey by night. A new game written in APL on the Commodore…
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
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From math to machine: translating a function to machine code
In this post I'm going to explore how a mathematical concept can be redefined in progressively more computer-oriented terms, all the way from high level languages down to machine code, ready for direct execution by a computer. To that end, I'm going to define the same logic in several different but related formats:
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Fifty Years of Diff
The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals. Later, as authorship diffused, on the principle of”You touched it last; it’s yours,” authorship was attributed only in the segregated chapter of unofficial…
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Creating standalone Mac OS X applications with Python and py2app
In this tutorial we’ll be using py2app to create a standalone OSX application from a Python 2 or 3 source code with a simple Tkinter user interface. "py2app is a Python setuptools command which will allow you to make standalone application bundles and plugins from Python scripts. py2app is similar in purpose and…
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How Laziness Works
So yesterday I saw someone ask about how many times the variable m gets evaluated in the following Haskell snippet:
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The Colors of Chemistry
This notebook documents my exploration of color theory and its applications to photochemistry. It also shows off the functionality of several Julia packages: Color.jl for color theory and colorimetry, SIUnits.jl for unitful computations, and Gadfly.jl for graph plotting.
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Finding Closure in Rust
Closures in Rust are powerful and flexible, building on traits, generics and ownership.
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Building a Blog with Elixir and Phoenix
Setting up a website using Elixir and Phoenix, leaning on NimblePublisher for the blog posts.
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Rust for C++ programmers – Part 8: destructuring
First an update on progress. You probably noticed this post took quite a while to come out. Fear not, I have not given up (yet). I have bee...
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The Hat, the Spectre and SAT Solvers (2024)
Introduction In this blog post you are going to read about two things:
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Beyond coupling and cohesion: strategies for un-fucking yourself
This post belongs in the ‘highly speculative’ category. It contains ideas that I’ve yet to flesh out and properly pin down. Reader beware!
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Lisp Hackers: Zach Beane
I'm starting a series of interviews with lispers, who inspire me. Lisp community includes a lot of amazing programmers, who's thoughts, I be...
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History of Symbolics Lisp Machines (2007)
Richard Stallman has been telling a story about the origins of the Lisp machine companies, and the effects on the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab, for many years. He has published it in a book, and in a widely-referenced paper, which you can find at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html .
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Mixins, Forwarding, and Delegation in JavaScript
This essay discusses how to separate JavaScript domain properties from object behaviour, without prototypes . This is deliberate. By examining four basic ways to have one object define the behaviour of other objects, we gain insight into what we’re trying to accomplish at a very basic level.
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OCaml on iOS 7 Released
Pansophical reader, with your bafflingly good mobile OCaml project, I’m ready at last to release an OCaml compiler for iOS 7. It works for all my projects, and I hope it works for yours.
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A New Back End for Cranelift: Instruction Selection
This post is the first in a three-part series about my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this first post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I'll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we've…
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A resizable concurrent map
In an earlier post, I showed how to implement the “world’s simplest lock-free hash table” in C++. It was so simple that you couldn’t even delete entries or …
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Dynamic Programming in Python: Bayesian Blocks (2012)
Of all the programming styles I have learned, dynamic programming is perhaps the most beautiful. It can take problems that, at first glance, look ugly and intractable, and solve the problem with clean, concise code. Where a simplistic algorithm might accomplish something by brute force, dynamic programming steps back…
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Numbering should start at zero (1982)
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
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How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
“There’s just no nice way to say this: Anyone who can’t make a syndication feed that’s well-formed XML is an incompetent fool.——Maybe this is unkind and elitist of me, but I think that anyone who either can’t or won’t implement these measures is, as noted above, a bozo.” – Tim Bray , co-editor of the XML 1.0…
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Do Not Log
Almost every week I accidentally get into this logging argument. Here’s the problem: people tend to log different things and call it a best-practice. And I a...
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Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)
This article will try to convince you that adding some limitations on legal Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames would be an improvement. Many programs already presume these limitations, the POSIX standard already permits such limitations, and many Unix/Linux filesystems already embed such limitations so it'd be better to make…
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On Two Views of Computation in Computer Science
Abstract: Machine and language models of computation differ so greatly in the computational complexity properties of their representation that they form two distinct classes that cannot be directly…
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Garbage Collectors Are Scary
Garbage collectors are expected to be invisible: if programmers (or even users) notice them, something is wrong. Usually, such problems are are performance problems, but there could be correctness issues as well. This makes implementing them a bit scary.