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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.
News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta
WebKit has had a big year, with over 162 new features and improvements shipping in WebKit browsers — including Safari 15.2, Safari 15.4, and Safari 15.5.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the YAML
Something I miss after emigrating from the UK to the USA is the using the name of a yeast extract based spread as an adjective. To describe something as “marmite”
Designing a Language Without a Parser
Designing a language, types first
Developer Experience: Fundamentally harder than normal UX
Many (maybe most) of us Software Engineers are deeply involved in projects where UI and UX are very important concerns (or at least they should be). Throughout the short history of our profession, we
Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer (2021)
A guide to learning COBOL for the modern programmer.
The Art of Debating for Software Developers
The keys to debate effectively as a software developer and therefore bringing value to yourself and your company.
I Prefer RST to Markdown (2024)
I will never stop dying on this hill
Performance comparison of Functional C++ 11, Java 8, JavaScript and Wolfram
In a recent post , Andreas declared his love for the programming language FORTRAN. He concluded his post with the question “Can a functional...
Mispredicted branches can multiply your running times
Modern processors are superscalar, meaning that they can execute many instructions at once. For example, some processors can retire four or six instructions per cycle. Furthermore, many of these processors can initiate instructions out-of-order: they can start working on instructions that appear much later in the…
The Next Twenty Years of Java: Where We've Been and Where We're Going
1995 was the year AOL floppy disks arrived in the mail, Netscape Navigator was born and the first public version of Java was released. Over the next two...
Go and Simplicity Debt
Fifteen years ago Python’s GIL wasn’t a big issue. Concurrency was something dismissed as probably unnecessary. What people really was needed was a faster interpreter, after all, who had more than one CPU? But, slowly, as the requirement for concurrency increased, the problems with the GIL increased.
Outsourcing Cost Boeing Billions (2019)
On October 29, 2018 Lion Air Flight 610, a 737 MAX 8 flight from Jakarta, Indonesia to Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia, crashed into the sea 13…
Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis
Recently there have been heated complaints that the culture of programming unfairly excludes some groups. They want to join the programming elite and get a spot at the startup trough. More power to…
What codegen is good for
Codegen isn't a replacement, but an extension of your programming. In this post, we share recommendations for using codegen to augment your workflows.
My Elm Experience
I've been using Elm since about one year back now. At the start of 2021 I began working with a client that had an existing Elm frontend code base and an early stage backend built in Elixir and Phoenix. This post will be about my experiences running face first into Elm. I'll be vague on some details as I can't share…
How to create portable Linux binaries
Creating application binaries for Linux that run on a wide range of distributions is a bit tricky, as different distributions ship different versions of various system libraries. These are usually backwards compatible, but not forwards compatible, so programs linked against older versions of the libraries also work…
Is React Having an Angular.js Moment?
React Server Components, while innovative, risk causing division in the React community due to their potential to undermine Single-Page App architecture.
Actually using ed (2012)
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…
Maybe adding generics to Go is about syntax after all
This is a short response to the recently announced Go 2 generics draft proposals
Using enums to represent state in Rust
Many Rust beginners with a background in systems programming tend to use bool (or even u8 – an 8-bit unsigned integer type) to represent “state”. For example, how about a bool to indicate whether a user is active or not? struct User { // ... …
Gitlab 13.10 Released
GitLab release announcements and feature highlights.
Tales of coding from a beginner
How I learned to stop worrying and love the code Photo by MipsyRetro/Flickr remix by Jason Reed I’m learning to code. I’ve been on again off again with it for about two years now. But I've only …
Beating C with Futhark Running on GPU
A high-performance and high-level purely functional data-parallel array programming language that can execute on the GPU and CPU.