Articles about programming languages, language history, comparisons, and coding archaeology discoveries.
News, insights, and deep dives into the world of programming languages.
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. …
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 …
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