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 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 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 →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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