Best of 2013

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2013. 227 posts.

Programming Languages
125

Julia, I love you (2012)

Julia is a new language for scientific computing that is winning praise from a slew of very smart people, including Harlan Harris, Chris Fonnesbeck, Douglas Bates, Vince Buffalo and Shane Conway. As a language, it has lofty design goals, which, if attained, will make it noticeably superior to Matlab, R and Python for…

142

Effective Scala

Scala is one of the main application programming languages used at Twitter. Much of our infrastructure is written in Scala and we have several large libraries supporting our use. While highly effective, Scala is also a large language, and our experiences have taught us to practice great care in its application. What…

144

PyPy.js: First Steps

I've been spending a lot of time in JavaScript land lately. It's not totally unexpected – when I first applied for a job with Mozilla, I was warned only semi-jokingly that "they hire all the best Python programmers and then force them to write JavaScript". I've no deep love or hate for it as a language, but JavaScript…

146

Write Yourself a Haskell in Lisp

For me, the best way to understand something is usually to implement it myself. So when I first started getting serious about Haskell, I implemented (in Common Lisp) a simple lazy functional programming language that used graph rewriting for the interpretation. Then, years later, I mentioned this implementation in a…