Welcome to my web site. I'm Simon Tatham, a software engineer and free-software author in Cambridge, UK.
Visit chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham → On Hacker News May 2010 – May 2026
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Structuring a large program is always a difficult job. One of the particular problems that often comes up is this: if you have a piece of code producing data, and another piece of code consuming it, which should be the caller and which should be the callee?
I encountered the idea as a student, when I first read The Art of Computer Programming . I’d been programming already for most of my childhood, and I was completely blown away by the idea, which was entirely new to me. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that in the whole of TAOCP that was the single…