Swift

Channels, Actors, and Goroutines: The Concurrency Models That Divided Language Design

In 1973, Carl Hewitt published a paper describing something he called the Actor model — isolated computational units that communicated exclusively by message passing, with no shared memory, no locks, …

The Many Ways to Fail: Error Handling Philosophies Across Programming Languages

Every program that has ever run has eventually encountered something unexpected. A file that wasn’t there. A network that dropped the connection. A number that divided by zero. A user who typed …

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 …

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. …