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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,274 posts.

2018
184

“Modern” C++ Lamentations

“ Standard Ranges ” blog post by Eric Niebler – about C++20 ranges feature – was doing rounds in the game development twitterverse lately, with many expressing something like a “dislike” (mildly said) about the state of modern C++.

186

JavaScript is Good, Actually

The subtext of many discussions around building software in Electron and React/Native involve this assumption that JavaScript is bad. There is a kind of unspoken understanding that JavaScript developers are stuck writing it, that either:

189

A Road to Common Lisp

I've gotten a bunch of emails asking for advice on how to learn Common Lisp in the present day. I decided to write down all the advice I've been giving through email and social media posts in the hopes that someone might find it useful.

191

Low Level Bit Hacks You Absolutely Must Know

I decided to write an article about a thing that is second nature to embedded systems programmers – low level bit hacks. Bit hacks are ingenious little programming tricks that manipulate integers in a smart and efficient manner. Instead of performing operations (such as counting the number of 1 bits in an integer)…

196

Python in Visual Studio Code

We are pleased to announce that the August 2018 release of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available. In this release we have closed a total of 38 issues including the stable release of our ptvsd 4 debugger, improvements to the language server preview, and other fixes.

200

Git log – The good parts

If you’re managing a complex git codebase with multiple developers, then you may well be using a tool like GitHub or BitBucket to delve into the history and figure out branch and merge issues.

202

Go += Package Versioning

More precisely, we need to add the concept of package versions to the working vocabulary of both Go developers and our tools, so that they can all be precise when talking to each other about exactly which program should be built, run, or analyzed. The go command needs to be able to tell developers exactly which…

207

Scrum disempowers developers

Last time, we looked at how Scrum has become the de facto definition of Agile, and how it is uniquely lacking in technical practices compared to the other methodologies that were involved in creating the Agile manifesto. This lack of technical good practices and craft causes some obvious

208

Using Java 9 Modularization to Ship Zero-Dependency Apps

When Java was first introduced, mainstream programming languages mostly either compiled to standalone executables (e.g. C/C++, COBOL), or else ran in an interpreter (e.g. Perl, Tcl). For many programmers, Java’s need for both a bytecode compiler and a runtime interpreter was a shift in thought. The compilation model…