Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 384 posts.

Programming Languages
6

Parse, Don’t Validate

Historically, I’ve struggled to find a concise, simple way to explain what it means to practice type-driven design. Too often, when someone asks me “How did you come up with this approach?” I find I can’t give them a satisfying answer. I know it didn’t just come to me in a vision—I have an iterative design process…

11

Ten Years of Erlang

For my ten years in the Erlang community, I decided to cover a few topics such as hype phases and how this related to Erlang, the ladder of ideas within the language and how that can impact adoption, what changed in my decade there, and what I think Erlang still has to bring to the programming community at large.

20

How to not rewrite it in Rust

Once you get past the growing pains of the Borrow Checker and realise Rust gives you the power to do things which would be unheard of (or just plain dangerous) in other languages, the temptation to Rewrite it in Rust can be quite strong. However at best, the temptation to RiiR is unproductive (unnecessary duplication…

21

Thoughts on Rust bloat

I’m about to accept a PR that will increase druid’s compile time about 3x and its executable size almost 2x. In this case, I think the tradeoff is worth it (without localization, a GUI toolkit is strictly a toy), but the bloat makes me unhappy and I think there is room for improvement in the Rust ecosystem.

30

Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

By now, many of you have seen the Perl 6 Github issue "Perl" in the name "Perl 6" is confusing and irritating . The issue suggested renaming Perl 6. While some may think that the name of the issue is trolling, or offensive, the actual issue was created by Elizabeth (Liz) Mattijsen, one of the core Perl 6 developers, a…