Best of 2018

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

Software Engineering
29

Why Does “=” Mean Assignment?

Take the following code: a = 1 a = a + 1 print(a) A common FP critique of imperative programming goes like this: “How can a = a + 1? That’s like saying 1 = 2. Mutable assignment makes no sense.” This is a notation mismatch: “equals” should mean “equality”, when it really means “assign”. I agree with this criticism and…