32 items tagged “programming-languages”
2023
Mojo may be the biggest programming advance in decades (via) Jeremy Howard makes a very convincing argument for why the new programming language Mojo is a big deal.
Mojo is a superset of Python designed by a team lead by Chris Lattner, who previously created LLVM, Clang and and Swift.
Existing Python code should work unmodified, but it also adds features that enable performant low-level programming—like “fn” for creating typed, compiled functions and “struct” for memory-optimized alternatives to classes.
It’s worth watching Jeremy’s video where he uses these features to get more than a 2000x speed up implementing matrix multiplication, while still keeping the code readable and easy to follow.
Mojo isn’t available yet outside of a playground preview environment, but it does look like an intriguing new project.
Cyber (via) “Cyber is a new language for fast, efficient, and concurrent scripting.” Lots of interesting ideas in here, but the one that really caught my eye is that its designed to be easily embedded into other languages and “will allow the host to insert gas mileage checks in user scripts. This allows the host to control how long a script can run”—my dream feature for implementing a safe, sandboxed extension mechanism! Cyber is implemented using Zig and LLVM.
2022
jq language description (via) I love jq but I’ve always found it difficult to remember how to use it, and the manual hasn’t helped me as much as I would hope. It turns out the jq wiki on GitHub offers an alternative, more detailed description of the language which fits the way my brain works a lot better.
2019
Programmer migration patterns. Avery Pennarun explores the history of modern programming languages and how developers have migrated from one to another over time. Lots of fun insights in this.
String length—Rosetta Code
(via)
Calculating the length of a string is surprisingly difficult once Unicode is involved. Here's a fascinating illustration of how that problem can be attached dozens of different programming languages. From that page: the string "J̲o̲s̲é̲" ("J\x{332}o\x{332}s\x{332}e\x{301}\x{332}") has 4 user-visible graphemes, 9 characters (code points), and 14 bytes when encoded in UTF-8.
2017
An Early History of Pony. Pony is an interesting looking new programming language, built around actor-based concurrency on top of a mathematically proved type system. The history of the language makes for interesting reading: it’s based on experience with actor libraries in C at an investment bank, combined with research into type systems at Imperial College London.
2015
Are traditional web frameworks and languages like RubyOnRail, Spring Boot and PHP dying now when new fast reactive pure JavaScript frameworks and services like Meteor, Node, Angular 2.0 and Firebase are breaking ground?
No.
[... 40 words]2014
Have you ever experienced a boost in productivity by switching to a different programming language?
Switching from PHP to Python (over a decade ago now) dramatically improved my productivity as a programmer.
[... 38 words]In simple terms, what is node.js?
It’s server-side programming, like PHP. The language you write the server-side code in is JavaScript (specifically the JavaScript version supported by Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, which was originally written for the Chrome web browser).
[... 46 words]2013
What are some good resources to learn how to cleanse data using Python?
http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/ “Text Processing in Python” is a free online book that covers a bunch of useful topics related to data cleanup. It’s over 10 years old now but is still mostly relevant—the chapter on regular expressions is particularly good.
Why doesn’t Google use their resources to improve coding languages?
Google invest vast resources in to language improvements, and have been doing so for over a decade now. Just off the top of my head...
[... 184 words]Why do programmers tend to fall in love with non-mainstream languages?
Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s right for every person, every problem or every situation. If no one ever explored non-mainstream options, better solutions would never be discovered.
[... 47 words]Web app: what programming knowledge do I need to create a goings on app?
For this kind of application a much more important question than "how can I build it? is "where will I get the data from?"—If you don’t have a good answer for that building the app is a waste of your time. The world is littered with local events listings apps that no one uses because they don’t have good data.
[... 82 words]Beginner JavaScript: more code or quality code?
Write more code. The more code you have written, the better you’ll be able to understand why certain techniques for creating higher quality code are worthwhile later on.
[... 70 words]In which programming language do programmers get paid the most?
The best (and best paid) software engineers work in multiple languages, and pick new ones up as and when they need to. If you pigeon-hole yourself as an “X programmer” you’ll limit yourself to relatively uninteresting, interchangeable roles.
[... 54 words]Which should I learn: Python or PHP?
Python will teach you more about programming than PHP—and you’ll be able to learn PHP easily if you learn Python first.
[... 36 words]What are some hidden features of Python?
Generators and Iterators are pretty amazing. These two tutorials will really open your eyes as to how powerful they can be:
[... 63 words]How do I learn Python fast?
Learn how to use the Python interactive prompt and start solving problems with it. The official Python tutorial is an excellent place to start: http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/
[... 38 words]2012
Which language and framework would you use today?
Unless I had a very good reason to use something else (a pure websocket/real-time collaboration app perhaps) I’d go with stock Django on PostgreSQL and maybe a bit of Redis. Simple, powerful, stable and works reliably.
[... 50 words]How can some really large services (like Dropbox) afford to use Python as a primary language, if it’s one to two orders of magnitude slower than other, compiled languages?
Because raw language speed often doesn’t matter that much. In the case if Dropbox the client software spends most of its time waiting for bits to load from the network or from disk. Most large websites spend their time waiting for the database. You can’t speed up network or disk performance by using a faster language.
[... 91 words]How difficult is to to learn a language framework, like node.js?
The answer varies enormously depending on the language and the framework. Some frameworks are very easy to pick up, others are harder.
[... 162 words]What are the best resources for learning regular expressions?
The O’Reilly book on Regular Expressions is absolutely superb. It will help you build a much deeper understanding if how they actually work than any online tutorial I’ve seen.
[... 62 words]What web programming framework best supports ’drag and drop’ actions? Please give examples of sites and/or plug-ins that support the interaction.
Drag and drop is a client-side thing—it has nothing to do with the server-side technology being used.
[... 72 words]Wouldn’t an ASCII cellular automaton in javascript be the simplest starting point to teach/learn programming?
Absolutely not. The first step in learning to program is understanding that a computer can be quickly made to do something useful by executing lines of code. Personally I’m a big fan of firing up something with an interactive prompt (like Python, or even Firebug or the Google Chrome JS console) and demonstrating that typing a line of code hitting return will get a useful response.
[... 87 words]What is an intuitive explanation of Unicode and why a programmer needs to know it?
Check out “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)” by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...
[... 55 words]Which web frameworks should I focus on to make myself the most well rounded and to be able to solve the most problems as a web application developer/architect?
Being an expert web developer isn’t about which framework you know, it’s about the fundamentals. It’s important that you know how the tools you are using work, so you can fix things when they break—Joel Spolsky’s law of leaky abstractions is a great essay about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...
[... 260 words]2011
2010
Why is Java perceived as not cool for startups? We seem to be getting a lot of feedback lately that a startup should be using Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, etc., if they want to be agile and iterate quickly.
You should re-evaluate your beliefs. Dynamic language programmers spend a great deal of time thinking about code quality and maintainability. TDD (and BDD), which I believe was first popularised within the Ruby community) are extremely widespread, and profiling and debugging tools are widely used and constantly improved. A strong test suite provides far more effective protection against bugs than static typing and an IDE.
[... 152 words]Would you recommend using Google Go with web.go, or Node.js for a new web server project which will involve high IO?
If you already know JavaScript, picking up Node.js is pretty easy. It also has a much larger community of web developers around it at the moment than web.go, which means there’s more example code / open source bits and pieces floating around.
[... 69 words]What are the main weaknesses of Java as a programming language?
A cultural bias towards over-engineering. In my experience Java code often ends up a huge network of Factories and AbstractFactories and Visitors and XML configuration files and every design pattern you care to mention, dozens of classes many of which contain hardly any procedural code at all. A lot of Java projects are essentially impossible to navigate without an IDE.
[... 77 words]