Articles about programming languages, language history, comparisons, and coding archaeology discoveries.
News, insights, and deep dives into the world of programming languages.
Every programming language eventually runs into the same wall: the programmer knows something at write time that the language cannot express directly. How to serialize a thousand different types …
Read more →The history of systems programming is, in part, a long procession of people standing up to announce that they had built a better C++.
They weren’t wrong. Many of them had built something better …
Read more →Ask a programmer which languages start arrays at 0 and which start them at 1, and you’ll get a confident answer. Ask them why, and the conversation gets interesting fast.
Most developers assume …
Read more →In 1973, Carl Hewitt published a paper describing something he called the Actor model — isolated computational units that communicated exclusively by message passing, with no shared memory, no locks, …
Read more →Every program that has ever run has eventually encountered something unexpected. A file that wasn’t there. A network that dropped the connection. A number that divided by zero. A user who typed …
Read more →In our three-part series on web backend performance, we measured idle memory ranging from 3 MB (Rust) to 500 MB (Spring Boot). We noted that a garbage collector explained much of Java’s …
Read more →In 2009, Tony Hoare stood at the QCon conference in London and confessed to a crime.
“I call it my billion-dollar mistake,” he said. “It was the invention of the null reference in …
Read more →Open almost any programming language reference and you will find, somewhere near the beginning, a section explaining how to define a reusable named block of code. The concept is universal. The word …
Read more →Every programming language has strings. They’re so universal — so unremarkable — that we rarely stop to ask how they actually work. You type some characters between quotation marks, hand them to …
Read more →Every programming language is, at its core, a written argument. An argument that the languages which came before failed at something important — something worth spending years of your life to fix. …
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