Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 679 posts.

Software Engineering
2011
456

Why Lisp Will Never Win (2003)

For 2003 OSCON I proposed to give nine five-minute talks in a 45-minute slot. To avoid confusing this with the real lightning talks sessions, Nat decided to call my talk ``Nine Views of Mark Jason Dominus''. At first I didn't like that title, which sounded too much like self-promotion. But I warmed up to it after a…

464

The plumber programmer

I called someone a plumber programmer the other day. The person I was speaking to didn't realize that "plumber programmer" is a term of great respect. The plumber is often the most experienced programmer on a team. As with literal plumbing, software plumbing connects things together. It deals with things other people…

467

Introduction to sed

sed book This is the world's best introduction to sed - the superman of UNIX stream editing. Originally I wrote this introduction for my second e-book, however later I decided to make it a part of the free e-book preview and republish it here as this article. Introduction to sed Mastering sed can be reduced to...