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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,274 posts.
Unit testing frameworks are quite popular in the object-oriented programming world. Frameworks like JUnit (for Java), SUnit (for Smalltalk), and CppUnit (for C++) provide a rich set of functionality. However, this rich set of functionality can be intimidating to someone who wants to do unit testing in a more…
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
Scheduling In Go : Part II - Go Scheduler. This blogpost is the second installment in a three-part series exploring the mechanics and semantics of the Go …
Laziness is often useful. It allows you to express “infinite” computations, and only pay for as much of the computation as you need.
As a researcher/engineer (really, an algorithm developer) in the general area of audio and speech processing, I've always run into the same difficulty at all the companies I've worked at: How to quickly prototype and develop algorithms, and subsequently turn them into efficient code that can be deployed to customers.
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 .
On this page I present a robust, custom build system for a software project written in C, in less than 500 lines of Python code. I think it is about as minimal as a practical dependency-tracking build system can get. Although it adds to the code that must be maintained as part of the project, I think that having a…
It’s been close to two years since I started working with AWS CloudFormation, the Infrastructure as Code solution by and for AWS. With CloudFormation you can describe and provision your entire AWS infrastructure in code. The entire AWS environment I work with is provisioned through CloudFormation - we only have…
A look at the new features in recent Git releases.
“Ah? A small aversion to menial labor?” The doctor cocked an eyebrow. “Understandable, but misplaced. One should treasure those hum-drum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and heart unfettered.”
My first exposure to programming was on an HP-85 . This must have been around 1992 or 1993; the machine was then already largely obsolete, having been first produced in 1980.
Hey, if all I have is lemons – I have no choice but to make lemonade out of them! if reproducible serious bugs are ignored for many months, it indicates one ...
We build smart, robust, enterprise-level software that works, both with you and for you.
I often don't blog about this kind of stuff. Yesterday I friend of mine showed me this awesome project called cool-retro-term . When yo...
I explain how Compiler Explorer runs on Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure
What does it mean to add versioning to the go command? The overview post gave a preview, but the followup posts focused mainly on underlying details: the import compatibility rule , minimal version selection , and defining go modules . With those better understood, this post examines the details of how versioning…
The Racket GUI library provides an "editor toolkit" which can be used to implement programs that use an interactive graphical canvas where objects can be moved around with the mouse. This toolkit has good reference documentation, however this documentatio...
You’ve implemented some of your performance critical code using the new platform intrinsics API. The code is now running 10x or even 100x faster than before, and you might think that it can’t get any faster. This post will show you some less obvious (but almost universally applicable) techniques for improving the…
A terminal built on web technologies
I haven’t been on r/lisp for a week or so due to being rather low on free time as we try and get an alpha of our game out of the door. When I did pop back I saw ‘5 Reasons why Lisp Games Suffer and proposed solution’ which I thought would be interesting, but what I found was bizarre and misinforming.
I am player at heart. I do not have time to play much, but since my young years, I have always been fascinated by gameplay mechanisms, to…
Deprecate the Nashorn JavaScript script engine and APIs, and the jjs tool, with the intent to remove them in a future release.
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…
