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Go At Heroku (Doozer)
Two Heroku system engineers discuss their experiences using Go.
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Perl 5.14 released
Awesome! Now http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html needs to be updated so perlbrew can find it.
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C Language Resources
Top 10 C Language resources that will turn you into a better programmer
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Strange line of Python
Hi 👋 you're reading a pretty old post! I started writing on here back in high school and this page may not reflect my current views. Recommend checking out related articles and categories down below, I've likely published more recent thoughts on this topic.
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Beyond Exception Handling: Conditions and Restarts
One of Lisp's great features is its condition system. It serves a similar purpose to the exception handling systems in Java, Python, and C++ but is more flexible. In fact, its flexibility extends beyond error handling--conditions are more general than exceptions in that a condition can represent any occurrence during…
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Objective-C's niche: why it survives in a world of alternatives
Objective-C remains an impediment for many programmers coming to the Mac or iPhone platforms — few programmers have ever experienced it before learning Cocoa, forcing two learning curves at once for new Cocoa developers. How did Apple end up with such a weird language? And for a company known to replace CPU…
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Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?
This morning Miroslav Bajtoš asked "Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?" in response to my article on regular expressions in C++. Other people asked similar questions yesterday. My response has two parts: Why I believe C++ libraries are often complicated. Why I don't think it has to be that way. Why would…
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In the Shadow of John McCarthy
John McCarthy was a genius of the highest order. Much is known about his contribution to Lisp as its inventor, but he was also the mind behind much of early AI research, the progenitor of much of computer chess, and the initiator of time-sharing. As a Lisp advocate I have many thanks due to John McCarthy and it…
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Understanding lvalues and rvalues in C and C++
The terms lvalue and rvalue are not something one runs into often in C/C++ programming, but when one does, it's usually not immediately clear what they mean. The most common place to run into these terms are in compiler error & warning messages. For example, compiling the following with gcc :
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Lua/APR - proper standard library for Lua
Lua/APR is a binding of the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) for the Lua programming language . APR powers software such as the Apache webserver and Subversion and Lua/APR makes the APR operating system interfaces available to Lua, serving as an extended standard library. Thus far the following modules have been…
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Parallelism is not concurrency
In an earlier post I mentioned that one goal of the new introductory curriculum at Carnegie Mellon is to teach parallelism as the general case of computing, rather than an esoteric, specialized sub…
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Dynamic languages are static languages
While reviewing some of the comments on my post about parallelism and concurrency, I noticed that the great fallacy about dynamic and static languages continues to hold people in its thrall. So, i…
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The context sensitivity of C's grammar
Context free grammars (CFGs) are a valuable theoretical tool on which the modern compilation theory relies for parsing the code of programming languages. For example, the most popular tool used for parsing – YACC , generates parsers for CFGs. What most people don’t know 1 is that the vast majority of programming…
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Things that amuse me
I think the only serious gripe is what you call your biggest gripe, and I must say that I envy this in Haskell. As you know, in the eager world we tend to write out our own recursive functions, rather than use combinators. You give part of the reason; the other part is that deforestation and related transformations…
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PEP 263 – Defining Python Source Code Encodings
This PEP proposes to introduce a syntax to declare the encoding of a Python source file. The encoding information is then used by the Python parser to interpret the file using the given encoding. Most notably this enhances the interpretation of Unicode ...
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Tutorial: Writing an Interpreter with PyPy, Part 1
This is a guest blog post written by Andrew Brown , with help from the PyPy developers on the pypy-dev mailing list. This tutorial's master...