Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 1,357 posts.

Software Engineering
942

Let’s stop copying C (2016)

Ah, C. The best lingua franca we have… because we have no other lingua francas. Linguae franca. Surgeons general? C is fairly old — 44 years, now! — and comes from a time when there were possibly more architectures than programming languages. It works well for what it is, and what it is is a relatively simple layer of…

946

The Road to Valhalla

The goal of Project Valhalla is to bring more flexible flattened data types to JVM-based languages, to bring the programming model back in line with the performance characteristics of modern hardware. The core feature is inline classes (known previously as value types ), but such a fundamental perturbation of the JVM…

952

New year, same old plans

The last time a major release of Light Table was in early 2016. It’s been 3 years. 3 years is a lot in developers time. Since, Light Table’s last release, vscode has developed from 0.10.6 to 1.32.0 . Amazing development happened in La La Clojure Land too, Clojure evolved from version 1.8.0 to 1.10.1-beta while…

957

A Grimoire of Functions

I'm the kind of person who reads encyclopedias front to back just for fun, and I've been fascinated by mathematical special functions at least since my first encounter with the gamma function as a teenager. My work implementing numerical and symbolic algorithms in mpmath , Arb and other software projects during the…