Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 874 posts.

Software Engineering
430

Open-Sourcing Inform 7

This is a talk and slides from Narrascope 2019 , held at MIT, Boston, on 14-16 June 2019. It's a sequel to a talk given in London a year earlier , when I went into "literate programming" at greater depth, but when the design of Inter was more embryonic. I'd like to thank the Narrascope organisers for fitting me in to…

437

Stop Memsetting Structures

TL;DR: Use C99’s designated initializers instead. Because it’s 2019! Edit: This post was discussed on Hacker News, Lobste.rs and /r/c_programming. It has been updated to address some of the concerns raised by commenters. One of the little things that annoy me when reading code is the unnecessary use of memset() to…

438

Skills Poor Programmers Lack

A friend and I had a discussion about the basic skills that are often lacking in experienced programmers. How can a programmer work for ten or twenty years and never learn to write good code? Too often they need close supervision to ensure they go down the right path, and can never be trusted to take technical…

441

Xfce 4.14 released

Why is the release manager late to the party with his blog post? The explanation is simple: We prioritized sticking to the schedule and getting our releases out to everyone as planned, as our codebase was ready. What was not (entirely) ready was some parts of the website, which were brought up-to-date over the course…

447

Lezer

I keep coming across people who consider parser technology a forbidding, scary field of programming. This is nonsense—a small parser can be very, very simple , and provide a wholesome exercise in recursive thinking. At the same time, it is true that you can make parsing extremely complicated. Mostly, this tends to…

449

Introduction to Svelte

I tried it out, ran through their tutorial, and built a few small things. And I can honestly say that I think writing Svelte feels even faster and easier than React. Svelte gave me the same spark, the same feeling of “wow!” that I had with React.