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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.
Last summer, I published Raven , an independent implementation of the Uxn CPU and Varavara ordinator . In short, this is a fictional computer designed for cross-platform portability: programs targetting it can be run on any platform that implements the specification.
Introduction A Markov Chain is a set of transitions from one state to the next; Such that the transition from the current state to the next depends only on the current state, the previous and future states do not effect the probability of the transition. A transitions independence from future and past sates is called…
I wrote Planjure to learn ClojureScript and Om. It’s a fun little program. You paint islands on a canvas and run path-planning algorithms to find the optimal path for your ship to traverse from start to finish. Sailing across blue ocean is faster than hiking through green islands. The three algorithms implemented are…
Software Development For People That Help People.
The .NET Framework was good. Really good. Until it wasn’t. Why did I leave .NET? In short, it constrained our ability to choose (which is a huge deal for
One of the first types we learn about is the boolean. It's pretty natural to use, because boolean logic underpins much of modern computing. And yet, it's one of the types we should probably be using a lot less of. In almost every single instance when you use a boolean, it should be something else.
The above is the Hello World program for Java, arguably one of the most popular programming languages. Encapsulated in the above three lines are several different concepts ranging from static functions to return types to stdout and to the entirety of object oriented programming in general.
Whenever there is a discussion online about the tools to build software, there is always That One Person that shows up and claims that all b...
Having benefited from “var” for many years when writing c#, I’m delighted that Java is at last getting support for local variable type inference in JDK 10. From JDK 10 instead of saying ArrayList<String> foo = new ArrayList<String>(); we can say var foo = new ArrayList<String>(); and the type of “foo” is inferred as…
Atwood's Law predicted JavaScript's dominance through accessibility. A new corollary is emerging: system languages will win through operational efficiency and AI-assisted development.
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
Mail::RFC822::Address is a Perl module to validate email addresses according to the RFC 822 grammar. It provides the same functionality as RFC::RFC822::Address, but uses Perl regular expressions rather that the Parse::RecDescent parser. This means that the module is much faster to load as it does not need to compile…
Yesterday, I was looking for some help trying to have a clean way to roll back database transactions at the end of a test in a Python TestC...
Models are getting better and better, while the agents that drive them languish.
The C++ library has long been organized around stream classes, at least when it comes to reading and parsing strings. But streams can be surprisingly slow. For example, if you want to parse numbers, then this C++ routine is close to being the worst possible choice for performance: std::stringstream in(mystring)…
The GNU Unifont project is amazing. It contains every Unicode glyph in one single file! I am going to argue that you should bundle it with your apps, your operating systems, and - at a pinch - your websites. The Unifont is a perfect fallback font. If your app or website uses a Unicode character which isn't supported…
How to use your language's most-overlooked feature to its utmost.
APL was invented by Ken Iverson in the early 1960s as a notation for array oriented calculations. It was precise and useful enough, so it…
To me, one of the most annoying parts of software engineering is writing code that doesn’t require thinking. It’s just a typing exercise, and that’s boring.
When I started working on Rust in 2011, my daughter was about three months old. She’s now in sixth grade, and she’s started growing rapidly. Sometimes we wake up to find that her clothes don’t quite fit anymore: the sleeves might be a little too short, or the legs come up to her ankles. Rust is experiencing something…
I've been playing around with SQLite the last couple of days. I thought I knew a little about SQLite, but I didn't, and am getting my remedial education through an accelerated gauntlet. Some of what …
Those who fail to study databases are doomed to write them
