Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 327 posts.

Programming Languages
74

Gleam Is Pragmatic

I’ve spent the past several years working with functional programming languages in my free time – primarily Haskell and OCaml. I love both languages but also find aspects of each frustrating. Haskell is terse and elegant with type classes providing a powerful mechanism for ad-hoc polymorphism. However, it can also be…

77

Coroutines and effects

For the past few months I’ve been mulling over some things that Russell Johnston made me realize about the relationship between effect systems and coroutines. You can read more of his thoughts on this subject here , but he made me realize that effect systems (like that found in Koka) and coroutines (like Rust’s async…

80

Lisp: Icing or Cake?

The Spring Lisp Game Jam 2024 ended one week ago. 48 games were submitted, a new record for the jam! This past week has been a time for participants to play and rate each other’s games. As I explored the entries, I noticed two distinct meta-patterns in how people approached building games with Lisp. I think these…

83

Janet for Mortals (2023)

I wrote a book. It’s called Janet for Mortals, and it’s free, and it’s on the internet, and you can read it right now. And you should read it right now, instead of reading this blog post, because this blog post is not very interesting if you haven’t read the book. Heck, this blog post is not very interesting even if…

85

What's New in POSIX 2024

In the 1950s, computers did not really interoperate. ARPANET has not yet happened (that would become a thing in the 60s), and every operating system was typically tied to the hardware that was meant to run on. Most communication actually happened over telephone, and no company was more present in that space than the…