Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 384 posts.

Programming Languages
218

Almost Always Unsigned

Almost Always Unsigned # Written by Dale Weiler Twitter GitHub Last updated Saturday, January 1, 2022 The need for signed integer arithmetic is often misplaced as most integers never represent negative values within a program. The indexing of arrays and iteration count of a loop reflects this concept as well. There…

220

Paving the on-ramp to Java

Java is one of the most widely taught programming languages in the world. Tens of thousands of educators find that the imperative core of the language combined with a straightforward standard library is a foundation that students can comfortably learn on. Choosing Java gives educators many degrees of freedom: they can…

239

I Built a Ruby Parser

Sorry, this post will read like a “dear diary” entry rather than some life-changing HN-worthy guidance. Back in November 2020, almost on a whim I started work on a new parser for the Ruby programming language. It was almost exactly a year after I had started working on my compiler project (I hope to write a longer…