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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 874 posts.

2019
245

Lisp is not based on the Lambda Calculus

How do you condense a 30 minute talk in 5 minutes? Should you even try? These are the questions I struggled with when someone nudged me to register for the lightning talks. My talk was 30 minute long because I was to jump in if a last-minute incident would prevent someone to get on stage. Call me the backup speaker…

249

Google to Reimplement Curl in Libcrurl

Not the entire thing, just "a subset". It's not stated very clearly exactly what that subset is but the easy interface is mentioned in the Chrome bug about this project. What? The Chromium bug states that they will create a library of their own (named libcrurl) that will offer (parts of) the libcurl API and … Continue…

252

Racket Is an Acceptable Python

A little over a decade ago, there were some popular blogposts about whether Ruby was an acceptable Lisp or whether even Lisp was an acceptable Lisp . Peter Norvig was also writing at the time introducing Python to Lisp programmers . Lisp, those in the know knew, was the right thing to strive for, and yet seemed…

259

Update on await syntax in Rust

In my previous post I said that the lang team would be making our final decision about the syntax of the await operator in the May 23 meeting. That was last Thursday, and we did reach a decision. In brief, we decided to go forward with the preliminary proposal I outlined earlier: a postfix dot syntax, future.await…

262

Syntax Highlighting Is Backwards (2018)

Most code editors color different pieces of your program in different ways. For instance, they’ll make keywords like if bold and bright so that you notice when you’ve misspelled them. They’ll make non-executable parts like comments and documentation fainter so that you know that the computer isn’t seeing that part of…

265

Containers, microservices, and service meshes

There is a lot of material out there about services meshes, and this is another one. Yay! But why? Because I would like to give you the perspective of someone who wish service meshes did exist 10 years ago, long before the rise of container platforms like Docker and Kubernetes. I’m not claiming that this perspective…

269

Three Tribes of Programming (2017)

There's an old joke that computer science is a lie, because its not really about computers, and its not really a science. Funny joke. Everyone laughs, then someone says "Yeah but it sort of is about computers though, isn't it?". Feet shuffle awkwardly. Someone clears their throat and before you

270

Vim tricks

I’ve been using Vim for eight years and am still discovering new things. This is usually seen as a Good Thing About Vim. In my head, though, it’s a failing of discoverability: I keep discovering new things because Vim makes it so hard to know what’s available. While people often talk about the beauty of modal editing…