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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,834 posts.

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12216

Why TDD isn't crap

After my recent vitriol about unit testing, a couple of people sent me Why TDD is Crap as a thorough debunking of TDD and unit testing. As someone very interested in software correctness, I ended up writing a debunking of his debunking. Transcriptions will be in quotes, my responses below. Some important notes: From…

12217

Paving the on-ramp to Java

Java is one of the most widely taught programming languages in the world. Tens of thousands of educators find that the imperative core of the language combined with a straightforward standard library is a foundation that students can comfortably learn on. Choosing Java gives educators many degrees of freedom: they can…

12223

V8 release v7.2

V8 v7.2 features high-speed JavaScript parsing, faster async-await, reduced memory consumption on ia32, public class fields, and much more!

12225

History of Spring Framework and Spring Boot

Spring framework is arguably one of the most popular application development frameworks used by java developers. It currently consists of a large number of modules providing a range of services. These include a component container, aspect oriented programming support for building cross cutting concerns, security…

12226

The Maddest My Code Made Anyone

I was lucky enough to grow up through the early 2000’s, during the golden age of Half-Life mods. Industry classics like Counter-Strike (CS) had just been invented, every month brought new mods to try, and files were too big to download on a dial-up connection so you’d leech them off a server at a big local LAN party…

12229

The Go Compiler Needs to Be Smarter

One of my favorite languages is the Go language. I love its simplicity. It is popular and useful in a cloud setting. Many popular tools are written in Go, and for good reasons. I gave a talk on Go last year and I was asked for a criticism of Go. I do not mind that … Continue reading The Go compiler needs to be smarter

12230

Go: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

This is an additional post in the “Go is not good” series. Go does have some nice features, hence the “The Good” part in this post, but overall I find it cumbersome and painful to use when we go beyond API or network servers (which is what it was designed ...

12231

Hundred Year Mistakes

My manager and I got off on a tangent in our most recent one-on-one on the subject of the durability of design mistakes in programming languages. A particular favourite of mine is the worst of the …