Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 1,274 posts.

Software Engineering
967

Twenty years, 1998 – 2018

Do you remember this exact day, twenty years ago? March 20, 1998. What exactly happened that day? I'll tell you what I did then. First a quick reminder of the state of popular culture at the time: three days later, on the 23rd, the movie Titanic would tangent the record and win eleven academy awards. … Continue…

974

Libcurl gets a URL API

libcurl has done internet transfers specified as URLs for a long time, but the URLs you'd tell libcurl to use would always just get parsed and used internally. Applications that pass in URLs to libcurl would of course still very often need to parse URLs, create URLs or otherwise handle them, but libcurl has not ……

983

Why not program right?

(Originally published on CACM blog.) Most of the world programs in a very strange way. Strange to me. I usually hear the reverse question: people ask us, the Eiffel community, to explain why we program our way. I hardly understand the question, because the only mystery is how anyone can even program in any other …

987

Gradual Programming

Programming is a fundamentally incremental (or gradual) process, and our programming languages should reflect that. I show several ways in which program models transition over time and discuss how future research can further a human-centric vision for programming languages.