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Magic Ink
This draft was released March 15, 2006. Please email comments to bret worrydream.com . You can also download the PDF .
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 88 posts.
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You Could Have Invented Monads! (And Maybe You Already Have.)
A more permanent version of this article is stored at GitHub . Please link to that rather than to here. If you hadn't guessed, this is about...
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Some AI Koans
These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of…
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Zawinski's Law
“ 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…
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The story of Mel (1983)
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
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The Git Parable (building a Git-like system from the ground up)
Git is a simple, but extremely powerful system. Most people try to teach Git by demonstrating a few dozen commands and then yelling “tadaaaaa.” I believe this method is flawed. Such a treatment may leave you with the ability to use Git to perform simple tasks, but the Git commands will still feel like magical…
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Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach
Name the most widely used bytecode interpreter or virtual machine. Sun's JVM? Adobe's Flash? .NET and Mono? Perl? Python? PHP? These are all certainly popular, but there's one more widely used than all those combined. That bytecode interpreter is Henry Spencer's regular expression library and its many descendants.
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A full TCP/IP stack in under 200 LoC (and the power of DSLs)
(Note: This is the third and final part of a series. Part one appeared Monday and part two appeared yesterday.)
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LOOP for Black Belts
In Chapter 7 I briefly discussed the extended LOOP macro. As I mentioned then, LOOP provides what is essentially a special-purpose language just for writing iteration constructs.
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The Duct Tape Programmer
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful thin…
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Tail Recursion Elimination
I recently posted an entry in my Python History blog on the origins of Python's functional features . A side remark about not supporting ta...
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Reddit Inc Blog Homepage
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
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Partmaps.org
All hotels in Mallorca. The best selection of Mallorca hotels with reviews and maps. Book in advance and save.
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JSONPath - XPath for JSON
A frequently emphasized advantage of XML is the availability of plenty tools to analyse, transform and selectively extract data out of XML documents. XPath is one of these powerful tools.
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The Most Unusual (and Best) Computer Language Book I've Ever Seen.
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, from Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby by _why the lucky stiff. CC BY-SA 2.5.
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ha ha only serious
[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or…
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Basics of the Unix Philosophy
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
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The Three Projections of Doctor Futamura
Introduction The Three Projections of Futamura are a sequence of applications of a programming technique called 'partial evaluation' or 'sp...
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PEP 289 – Generator Expressions
This PEP introduces generator expressions as a high performance, memory efficient generalization of list comprehensions PEP 202 and generators PEP 255.
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bliki: Anemic Domain Model
If you use an object-oriented domain model, and you don't put behavior in your objects, you're missing out on most of the benefits of that pattern.
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The Development Abstraction Layer
A young man comes to town. He is reasonably good looking, has a little money in his pocket. He finds it easy to talk to women. He doesn’t speak much about his past, but it is clear that he sp…
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Steve Yegge: Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp. (2006)
Another enjoyable read. Thanks! One thing, though -- it's about time to update your understandings of Python's object system. Python's culture doesn't insist that traditional (Smalltalkish) OO is the One True Way to re-use code, but that doesn't mean that everything in Python is not an object (because they are, since…
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A performance comparison of Judy to hash tables
Numerous claims about Judy's performance are made in the Judy whitepaper . I don't think any of those claims are wrong. However, it does not appear that sufficient effort was put in benchmarking Judy against other data structures. Now, it is unlikely there is another data structure that is both as fast and as small as…