Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 427 posts.

Programming Languages
245

Micro C, Part 3: Generating LLVM

In part 2, we completed the user facing part of the compiler with semantic analysis. Now we're free to focus on the backend, generating LLVM. To do so, we'll use the llvm-hs-pure library, which embeds LLVM into a Haskell ADT, allowing us to manipulate it without having to set up any FFI.|A blog about various…

254

J Notation as a Tool of Thought

Kenneth Iverson’s 1964 language, APL, won him the Turing Award. His award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought, argued that better notations would lead people to deeper insights about mathematics. He provided a number of examples ranging across linear algebra, arithmetic, probability, and logic. Unfortunately, most…