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Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language
programming, language design, and human factors
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,842 posts.
14552
Fixing JSON
I’ve edited a couple of the JSON RFCs, and am working on the design of a fairly complex DSL, so I think I can claim to have dug deeper in the JSON mines than most. We can easily agree on what’s wrong with JSON, and I can’t help wondering if it’d be worth fixing it.
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Why undefined behavior may call a never-called function
My twitter feed has recently been filled with discussions about the following program #include <cstdlib> typedef int (*Function)(); s...
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What’s to love about C?
Antiquated, clunky, and unsafe. Though beloved to some, C is a language that many choose to hate. The mass opinion is indeed so negative it’s hard to believe that anybody would program anything in C. Yet they do. In fact a lot of things, even new things, are programmed in C. The standard was recently […]
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Laws of Performant Software
Learning how to write performant code is hard. Here are a few simple laws that I hope will convey the core of the matter. I’m calling them…
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Emacs arbitrary code execution and how to avoid it
A post by Eshel Yaron with details and advice about a long standing arbitrary code execution vulnerability in Emacs
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Cheating at a company group activity using Unix tools
The tools you didn’t know you need
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Taking PHP Seriously (2016)
Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if…
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Where are we going from here? Software engineering needs formal methods
The job of a software engineer is not to produce code, but to solve problems; we just happen to solve most of those problems by producing code. Ultimately, producing code is hard, and we need help. That's why GitHub's Copilot is exciting, but it's far from ideal, and it's the tip of the iceberg of what's been done and…
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Actually using Ed
The classic ed editor is a really good example of a sparse, minimal, standard Unix tool that does one thing, and does it well. Because there are so many good screen-oriented editors for Unix, there’s seldom very much call for using ed , unless you’re working on very old or very limited hardware that won’t run anything…
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You shouldn't invoke setup.py directly
The setup.py interface is an old convention from distutils, one that has bugs that cannot be fixed to bring it into line with modern Python packaging approaches. As a result, all direct...
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My Favorite Engineering Interview Question
As Ning is ramping up recruiting again, I need to brush off my interrogation techniques interview questions. Sadly, one of my favorites is no longer so useful, as originally designed, due to technical advances in hard drives. I figured I’d share and discuss how I use it. Hopefully folks can give me some feedback on…
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C# 8: Switch expressions
COCOL88 merupakan juragan yang sangat terpercaya dalam lingkup permainan online gacoryang mempunyai skill keamanan yang sangat tinggi dan persentase kemenangan yang akurat dengan fitur RTP yang disediakan oleh situs COCOL88
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0xCAFEBABE & 0xFEEDFACE (2003)
Tuesday, January 28, 2003 0xCAFEBABE & 0xFEEDFACE Recently, the origin of the magic numbers of 0xCAFEBABE and 0xFEEDFACE came up in an email conversation between a number of ex-NeXT folks. Specifically, someone asked what the origin of the two magic numbers were in the context of mach-o file formats and why had Java…
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SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order
Since the publication of its first edition in 1984 and its second edition in 1996, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) has influenced co...
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BASIC was not just a programming language
BASIC is often dismissed as an inferior language compared to its successors. Common complaints are its use of line numbers, its heavy reliance on GOTO for execution flow, and its lack of a stack for local variables. What many critics overlook is that at the time of its use (during the first wave of home computers)…
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Don't trust default timeouts
Modern applications don’t crash; they hang. One of the main reasons for it is the assumption that the network is reliable. It isn’t. When you make a network call without setting a timeout, you are telling your code that you are 100% confident that the call is going to succeed. Would you really take that bet? If you…
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DELETEs Are Difficult
Why are database DELETEs complex and inefficient? Uncover challenges from physical data removal to autovacuum, and find strategies for managing large deletions.
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A Little Clojure
This expression: (1 2) represents the list containing the integers 1 and 2 in that order. If you want an empty list, that’s just () . And the list of the first five letters of the alphabet is just (\a \b \c \d \e) .
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Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
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C++26 Reflections adventures and compile-time UML
The first thing I do every time I need to learn a new codebase is to start drawing the UML diagram of its classes, and usually give up soon after I started. The process of doing it manually is certainly useful, but now with reflections I figure it would be fun to try to generate it instead.
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Atom 1.28
We are archiving Atom and all projects under the Atom organization for an official sunset on December 15, 2022.
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C++20 Modules with GCC11
Introduction One of the headline changes of the C++20 standard is the inclusion of modules. Modules promise to significantly change the structure of C++ codebases and possibly signal headers’ ultimate demise (but probably not in my lifetime). It also opens the door to potentially have a unified build system and…
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