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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,844 posts.

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19714

Planjure: A* and Dijkstra's in Om

I wrote Planjure to learn ClojureScript and Om. It’s a fun little program. You paint islands on a canvas and run path-planning algorithms to find the optimal path for your ship to traverse from start to finish. Sailing across blue ocean is faster than hiking through green islands. The three algorithms implemented are…

19719

PHP 5.5.5 Released

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

19722

Python is the new BASIC

The above is the Hello World program for Java, arguably one of the most popular programming languages. Encapsulated in the above three lines are several different concepts ranging from static functions to return types to stdout and to the entirety of object oriented programming in general.

19731

Regexp-based RFC822 email address validation

Mail::RFC822::Address is a Perl module to validate email addresses according to the RFC 822 grammar. It provides the same functionality as RFC::RFC822::Address, but uses Perl regular expressions rather that the Parse::RecDescent parser. This means that the module is much faster to load as it does not need to compile…

19734

For processing strings, streams in C++ can be slow

The C++ library has long been organized around stream classes, at least when it comes to reading and parsing strings. But streams can be surprisingly slow. For example, if you want to parse numbers, then this C++ routine is close to being the worst possible choice for performance: std::stringstream in(mystring)…

19735

Banish missing glyphs with Unifont

The GNU Unifont project is amazing. It contains every Unicode glyph in one single file! I am going to argue that you should bundle it with your apps, your operating systems, and - at a pinch - your websites. The Unifont is a perfect fallback font. If your app or website uses a Unicode character which isn't supported…