Visit blog.fogus.me → RSS feedOn Hacker News Feb 2009 – Aug 2026
Programming Languages 16Life, Learning & Writing 14Software Engineering 13History & Retro Computing 8Web & Frontend 2Career & Management 2
Let me preface this post by saying that no programmer should feel compelled to read any of these papers. I list them because I think that they provide a breadth of information that is generally useful and interesting from a computer science perspective. What you do with that information is your prerogative, including…
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2015. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
I came across a GH thread related to chess engine development that made me think of why hobby programming communities are increasingly hostile toward LLM development. While the thread doesn’t give a lot of insight into answering the question, it prompted me to think about it a bit. I’ve seen similar sentiments…
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2025. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
Computer Science-Fiction 1 is not actually fiction. Instead, these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality. Indeed, very often works of Computer Science-Fiction push the limits of your understanding of just what constitutes the…
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2014. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
I recently compiled a list of Perlis Languages that were meant to illustrate varying paradigms not typically found in mainstream programming languages. Those languages were meant to stretch your mind and are not necessarily representative of the state of the art in language design and implementation. In this post I…
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2021. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2024. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2013. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
For many years I was whole hog into the open-source movement and at the time I rarely wrote a stitch of code in my free time that didn’t find itself in a public Sourceforge/GCode/Github repo. 1 However, over time I came to learn that the burden that came with publicly offering code to the universe, to put it mildly…
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2022. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. – Alan Perlis
As I listen to “Soup” by Can I’m reminded of the time when Alan Kay took some time to post on Hacker News addressing his thoughts and ideas about object-oriented programming. For raw context read the original thread, but in this post I’ll attempt to annotate some of what was posted. For the purpose of this post…
this post was discussed on various posts and podcasts including: Ruby5 , HackerNews , and Ruby Inside . BTW, this is now 29 27 25 lines.
caveat: tthis is not a best-of nor a comprehensive list of Lisp books; it is merely a selection of Lisp books you may not have heard of or that special to me in some way. If you find this post interesting then you might like my yearly best-of posts .
Lately I’ve been reading old computing papers, articles, journals, magazines, and memos and tweeting about them as I work my way through. The most recent exploration was of an Apple internal memo about the history of Apple’s involvement with Pascal. The memo is cursory, but it does provide an interesting snapshot of…
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2020. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
Like many programmers, I’m always on the lookout for the perfect programming book. Over the years I have tried to enumerate a few key examples , however after reading them all I am still left wanting. However, I recently came across a couple interesting blog posts [^motivation] that motivated me that the only way to…
Earlier today Rich Hickey let the cat out of the bag that I’m joining the Clojure Core development team.
I’ve been programming for quite some time and have explored a variety of programming paradigms along the way. From time to time people will ask 1 which is better: functional programming or object-oriented programming. Having done both extensively in my time I can exclaim a resounding: it depends .
The German school of Lisp is described by Kazimir Majorinc as a Spartan movement 1 in Lisp implementation. But let me be clear, the Lisps in question are not toys like the one’s littering the Lisp landscape (including my own ). Likewise, these Lisps are not libraries nor are they full-blown development ecosystems.
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2017. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2019. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
The famous book publisher Hayward Cirker, the founder of Dover Publications built a fortune on finding obscure books that had either gone out of print or escaped publication altogether, and printing them himself. Among his many successes you’ll find amazing books on mathematics and physics including The Theory of…
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2012. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
this is the first entry in an n-part series explaining the techniques and design principles of ClojureScript . translations: [ 日本語 ]
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2011. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
The Clojure Core team recently released a new Clojure library, tools.build , that is a culmination of thought around batteries-included build support for Clojure projects. I won’t go into detail around the history and contents of the library in this post because much of that is found elsewhere, including the…
A few years ago I got the idea that it would be fun to implement a variant of Scheme targeting the JVM. During my search for different ways to implement numerics I looked deeply at the implementation of two languages: JScheme and a little-known language Clojure . During my explorations with these two languages and the…