Linked Languages

Java at 30: The Genius Behind the Code That Changed Tech (15 May 2025) From trash-diving teen to tech pioneer, James Gosling's pragmatic genius shaped three decades of Java and modern computing.

A Blast From The Past (14 April 2025) The UCSD p-System, Apple Pascal, and a dream of cross-platform compatibility never quite realized

Learn a language by writing too many Forths (5 July 2022) What I've been doing with Ripen.

A love of languages (9 March 2022) I disagree with the specifics, but the spirit of this post very much describes me.

In defense of complicated programming languages (23 January 2022) I don't agree with all of it; there's fundamental complexity and accidental complexity, and it's all too easy to add the latter while thinking it's the former. Also, if you spend all your energy wrangling your tools, you won't have any left for solving the actual problem. But the main point stands.

Parser generators vs. handwritten parsers: surveying major language implementations in 2021 (21 August 2021) Short version: a surprising number of compilers and interpreters use hand-written parsers, even some I didn't expect to. And it tends to speed things up as a general rule.

Julia: A Post-mortem (7 March 2021) In the end, code doesn’t make software – people and communities do. (emphasis mine)

Built to Last (31 August 2020): When overwhelmed unemployment insurance systems malfunctioned during the pandemic, governments blamed the sixty-year-old programming language COBOL. But what really failed?

Rust, A Game Review (7 June 2019) Disclaimer: As a mod of /r/rust, I see a lot posts and comments confusing the game with the programming language. So I decided to write this humorous take.

A Look at the Design of Lua (1 November 2018) Simplicity, small size, portability, and embeddability set Lua apart from other scripting languages.

Have you considered Rewriting It In Rust? (22 March 2016): this is satire, by the way.

And some really old links:

Python

Python in 2021: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (2 September 2021) Then again, that's why I refuse to use pip and stick to the operating system's package manager, or at most setup.py. Of course installing libraries from different sources, most of which are unaware of the specifics of your system, will mess things up. Be reasonable. Oh, and learn to keep your addiction to dependencies under control already.

Perl, Awk, sed

C and C++

The two factions of C++ (24 November 2024) The dream of a single dialect-free C++ has probably been dead for many years, anyway.

Vala: the smoothest C off-ramp (13 April 2024) Using Vala to rewrite old C code

Bjarne Stroustrup’s Plan for Bringing Safety to C++ (29 October 2023) At the CppCon C++ conference, the C++ creator identified the specific kinds of safety measures sorely needed in the programming language.

Rust, Zig, and the Futility of "Replacing" C (27 February 2021) They let ideology come before pragmatic engineering.

And a really old one: C as an intermediate language (30 September 2012)

Go

Errors vs. exceptions in Go and C++ in 2020 (December 2020) Why and how exceptions are still better for performance, even in Go