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Strong software tips from 2000 that are 100% valid today
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
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Worse Is Better (2001)
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
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Fire And Motion (2002)
Sometimes I just can’t get anything done. Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American E…
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"Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]
About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters , in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase "computer science".
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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
36
(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
Why does this matter? As Steve Yegge said , "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work." Yegge describes 8 problems that can be solved with compilers (or equally well with interpreters, or with Yegge's typical heavy dosage of cynicism).
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Great Hackers (2004)
July 2004 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.) A few months ago I finished a new book , and in reviews I keep noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say nothing of "idiotic.'' I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste…
38
The Story Of Mel
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather ( < nather@astro.as.utexas.edu > ), on May 21, 1983.
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Category Theory for Programmers (2014)
Table of Contents Part One Category: The Essence of Composition Types and Functions Categories Great and Small Kleisli Categories Products and Coproducts Simple Algebraic Data Types Functors Functo…
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Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)
David A. Wheeler's Page on Countering 'Trusting Trust' through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers
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The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code (2000; Still relevant?)
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
44
What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
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A Plan for Spam
August 2002 (This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc . An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering .) I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the…
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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
48
Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful
Every concurrency API needs a way to run code concurrently. Here's some examples of what that looks like using different APIs:
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Boundaries
This talk is about using simple values (as opposed to complex objects) not just for holding data, but also as the boundaries between components and subsystems. It moves through many topics: functional programming; mutability's relationship to OO; isolated unit testing with and without test doubles; and concurrency, to…
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Ripgrep – A new command line search tool
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
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John Carmack on Inlined Code
The real enemy addressed by inlining is unexpected dependency and mutation of state, which functional programming solves more directly and completely. However, if you are going to make a lot of state changes, having them all happen inline does have advantages; you should be made constantly aware of the full horror of…
52
Coroutines in C (2000)
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?
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Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (2001)
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending…
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Bret Victor: Learnable Programming
Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types.
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The Lisp Curse
The expressive power of Lisp has drawbacks.
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A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux (1999)
If you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find herein the perfect antidote.
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How To Become A Hacker
As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed…
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PHP: A fractal of bad design
(This article has been translated into Spanish (PDF, with some additions) by Jorge Amado Soria Ramirez — thanks!) Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us
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The Wrong Abstraction (2016)
I've been thinking about the consequences of the "wrong abstraction." My RailsConf 2014 "all the little things" talk included a section where I asserted: > duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction And in the summary, I went on to advise: >
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Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses
Perhaps you've read posts like Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names and Falsehoods programmers believe about time . Maybe you've also read Falsehoods programmers believe about geography .