Welcome to the ninth issue of The Left Fold, a weekly programming news and article digest.

Development

API Design Matters: critiques existing APIs and provides guidelines. (LtU)
Flickr Doesn't Branch: how they do continuous integration and develop new features without branching. (reddit)

Programming Languages and Implementations

Pitfalls of Object-Oriented Programming: highlights the memory impact of OO techniques in the context of graphics rendering. Summary starts on page 108.
Clojure 1.1 Transients and Chunked Sequences: details on the new optimizations. (reddit)
Making GHC's I/O Manager More Scalable: a quick look into how GHC supports lightweight threads that don't block when performing I/O.
Unladen Swallow project no longer optimistic about removing the GIL: the project aiming to improve CPython's performance has recently updated its plan with a pessimistic outlook on removing the lock that prevents threads from executing simultaneously in the same process.
Python, Surprise Me!: a series of inconsistencies.
Why BASIC is Still Relevant: little explanation of the machinery necessary.
LLVM Project Blog: newly-launched. The introduction to load elimination articles are interesting.

Efficient Software-Based Fault Isolation: summary and discussion of the paper introducing fault isolation within a single address space.
Reweighting a Graph for Faster Shortest Paths: an introduction to A* search.

The C Programming Language: 4.10 Recursion: a fun tale.
Funding Clojure: discussion of the different funding models for free / open source software. (reddit)

I expect the next two weeks to be lean on interesting news and articles due to the holidays. If there's not enough for an issue either week, there won't be one.