Programming Language Popularity

Some interesting metrics of programming language popularity. LangPop.com – statistics on greping search queries on various web properties — usage in open source projects, books published on Amazon.com, etc. TIOBE index – similar listing, of search engine results exclusively.  Longer tail listing, and shows trending. Happiest users – this one is just a static blog …

Continuation Patterns

Interesting paper on the topic of various program patterns implemented in coroutine.  As mentioned in a previous post, continuations are a powerful control flow primitive — they can be used for: Call with Current Continuation Patterns, Ferguson & Deugo Escaping recursive procedures and loops Reentry into recursion Coroutines Backtracking Simulating multitasking The paper covers these …

The Python debate on Tail Calls

The Beginning It started with an innocent enough blog post by Guido van Rossum commenting on Python’s lack of tail call elimination in Python’s history.  Okay, not even commenting – it was a parenthetical sentence fragment! “Origins of Python’s “Functional” Features” on The History of Python The internet went crazy with comments.  Guido attempted to …