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 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. …
Read more →In Part 1 we measured what web backends cost before serving a single request — idle memory ranging from 3 MB (Rust) to 500 MB (Spring Boot). In Part 2 we measured what happens when traffic arrives — …
Read more →In Part 1, we measured what web backend frameworks cost before serving a single request — idle memory, startup time, and Docker image sizes. We found a 30-100x spread between the lightest (Rust …
Read more →Last week we looked at the top web programming languages and the frameworks developers are choosing in 2026. But there’s a question those rankings don’t answer: what does each of those …
Read more →Last week we looked at the top programming languages overall. But web development is its own world with its own hierarchy. The language that tops general-purpose rankings (Python) isn’t the one …
Read more →Every year, dozens of indices claim to rank the “top” programming languages. The problem? They all measure different things and often tell contradictory stories. TIOBE says C is #2; GitHub …
Read more →Open your browser’s developer console right now and type 0.1 + 0.2. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
You expected 0.3, didn’t you? Instead, you got:
0.30000000000000004
This isn’t a …
Read more →Somewhere right now, a FORTRAN program written in the 1970s is predicting tomorrow’s weather. A COBOL system is processing your credit card transaction. A Lisp-based AI is helping plan a …
Read more →Most developers spend their careers working with a handful of mainstream languages—Java, Python, JavaScript, maybe some C++. But beneath the surface of popular programming lies a fascinating world of …
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