Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 433 posts.

Programming Languages
3

An Intro to Compilers

A compiler is just a program that translates other programs. Traditional compilers translate source code into executable machine code that your computer understands. (Some compilers translate source code into another programming language. These compilers are called source-to-source translators or transpilers.) LLVM is…

5

Announcing CoffeeScript 2

We are pleased to announce CoffeeScript 2! This new release of the CoffeeScript language and compiler aims to bring CoffeeScript into the modern JavaScript era, closing gaps in compatibility with JavaScript while preserving the clean syntax that is CoffeeScript’s hallmark. In a nutshell:

12

Curl is C

For some reason, this post got picked up again and is debated today in 2021, almost 4 years since I wrote it. Some things have changed in the mean time and I might've phrased a few things differently if I had written this today. But still, what's here below is what I wrote back then. … Continue reading curl is C →

23

TypeScript at Slack

When Brendan Eich created the very first version of JavaScript for Netscape Navigator 2.0 in merely ten days, it’s likely that he did not expect how far the Slack Desktop App would take his invention: We use one JavaScript code base to build a multi-threaded desktop application, routinely interacting with native code…