Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 204 posts.

Programming Languages
91

KDE makes Qt

Recently I was trying some statistics on the qtbase-module (where QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets and so on lives) and was wondering who made them. Not based on their current paid affilation, like Thiago’s graphs , but if each commit was made by a person coming from KDE.

97

Talking about “types”

My essay “In Search of Types” attempts to be a dispassionate review of some of the different concepts, purposes and attitudes surrounding the word “type” in programming. I imagine that my passions are still rather thinly veiled in places. But in this post I'm going to come out with a more unabashedly ranty take…

109

Haskell, Monads and Purity

I believe the notion that Haskell uses “monads” to enforce purity is rather misleading. It has certainly caused quite a bit of confusion! It’s very much like saying we use “rings to do arithmetic”. We don’t! We use numbers, which just happen to form a ring with arithmetic operations. The important idea is the number …

117

Why CoffeeScript Isn't the Answer

CoffeeScript is an open source project that provides a new syntax for JavaScript. I have to say that I have a lot of respect for CoffeeScript and it got a lot of things right. The “golden rule” of CoffeeScript is “It’s just JavaScript” . That means there is a straightforward equivalent to every line of CoffeeScript…