Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 701 posts.
“ Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. ” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “ Law of Software Envelopment ”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and…
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
Starting Forth has always been the fun way to learn Forth programming. This free, online edition uses updated code that runs on modern Forth systems.
1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary , usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022509 points587 commentscited by 33History & Retro Computing details
This week we are taking a look at the latest winner of the ACOUP Senate poll, which posed the question “Why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?” To answer that,…
Originally published in the AppleDirect, August, 1989 Republished as Chapter 6, in Tog on Interface
In the summer of 1994 Naughty Dog, Inc. was still a two-man company, myself and my longtime partner Jason Rubin. Over the preceding eight years, we had published six games as a lean and mean duo, b…
(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp � both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of…
This is the tale of what for me was a rather remarkable adventure. It was assembled on the basis of my personal recollection and experience, emails, GPS logs and some official documents. It represents solely the perspective and opinions of myself, in my more lucid moments. It is in no way intended to represent th
Dr. Drang (And now it's all this)2011231 points97 commentscited by 30History & Retro Computing details
Another great post
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020120 points32 commentscited by 30History & Retro Computing details
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! This essay will hopefully be the first post in a series (II, III, IV, A) covering some of th…
Question for Quote Investigator: The gyrations of financial markets can be startling. You may have unassailable information indicating that a stock is overpriced or underpriced, but you can still lose money because the market price may not accurately reflect the underlying verities for years. Here is a pertinent adage:
Mark Twain? Jonathan Swift? Thomas Francklin? Fisher Ames? Thomas Jefferson? John Randolph? Charles Haddon Spurgeon? Winston Churchill? Terry Pratchett? Anonymous?
I. Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later.…
I. A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, a…
This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014 , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC.
Western leaders gave multiple assurances against NATO expansion to Gorbachev in 1990-1991 according to declassified American, Russian, British, Germans documents
Upton Sinclair? H. L. Mencken? William Jennings Bryan? C. E. M. Joad? Christopher Matthews? Paul Krugman? Anonymous?
Making a demo in just 256 bytes would be a formidable challenge regardless of platform. A Mind Is Born is my attempt to do it on the Commodore 64. In the absence of an actual 256-byte compo, it was submitted to the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017 , where it ended up on 1st place.
The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone. Our work flows from a vision that includes a creative individual and the best computing hardware available. We have chosen to concentrate on two principle areas of research: a language of description (programming…
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
Last substantive modification 1996-04-10 or earlier; Kragen link updated 2016-11-30
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Will Snellen wrote a PDF version using the phonetic alphabet . You can hear some of it pronounced mostly correctly in videos here:
The programming language Pascal has become the dominant language of instruction in computer science education. It has also strongly influenced languages developed subsequently, in particular Ada.
TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis , has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple , a 640x480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from…
Copyright 1999 by Craig A. Finseth. Contact the author with questions about distribution rights.
