Best of 2009

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2009. 144 posts.

Programming Languages
40

Secret Perl Operators

I love Perl because of its expressiveness. You can write incredible code and it feels just so natural compared to other languages. Here are 8 secret Perl operators that I often use. Only one of them is a real operator (first one). The others are syntactic tricks that make them look like operators but they are not…

55

Haskell is beautiful in practice

I’ve been writing a bit of Haskell lately (see my GitHub page ), and it’s an absolutely beautiful experience. And I mean that in every way: The language itself of course, but also the community, the documentation, the package system and the Haskell platform ultimately help make the practice of writing Haskell more…

58

Why Reddit uses Python

During Steve Huffman’s and Alexis Ohanian’s Pycon Keynote , someone asked why Reddit was moved from Lisp to Python . The reason for moving wasn’t too interesting, but why they have stayed is. Steve gave two “huge” reasons Reddit continues to use Python: