Rust

The Billion-Dollar Mistake, 60 Years Later: How Languages Handle Null

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 …

def, func, fun, fn, sub: Why Every Language Has a Different Word for the Same Thing

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 …

Strings Are Not Simple: How 12 Languages Model Text (And Why They Disagree)

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 …

How 10 New Programming Languages Are Rewriting the Rules (And Why They Were Born)

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. …

The Weight of Your Web Stack, Part 3: Choosing the Right Backend for the Job

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 — …

The Weight of Your Web Stack, Part 2: What Your Backend Costs Under Load

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 …

The Weight of Your Web Stack, Part 1: What Your Backend Costs at Rest

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 …