Topics /

Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 403 posts.

2009
153

Problems with TDD

If you have not yet read it, please read Maria Siniaalto's 15 page " Test-Driven Development: empirical body of evidence ." It summarizes the few empirical studies done to evaluate the effectiveness of TDD. In the conclusion you'll find:

159

JQuery is a monad

It’s said that every Haskell programmer writes their own monad tutorial, and with good reason: once you finally understand the definition and capabilities of a monad, you’ll be eager to…

167

Tail Call Amputation

This is perhaps a slight digression; just an extended expression of pleasure about Clojure’s recur statement. It neatly squashes a bee I’ve had in my bonnet for some years now; if it’s wrong to loathe “tail recursion optimization” then I don’t want to be right.

172

Etherpad includes banned (on Google code) software JSMin

Last week, Google banned my PHP port of JSMin from Google Code due to a quibble over a line in the license stating that “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil”, which they believe makes the license non-free. When I asked Google’s Chris DiBona whether all Google Code projects including JSMin would be subject to…

174

Haskell is beautiful in practice

I’ve been writing a bit of Haskell lately (see my GitHub page ), and it’s an absolutely beautiful experience. And I mean that in every way: The language itself of course, but also the community, the documentation, the package system and the Haskell platform ultimately help make the practice of writing Haskell more…

180

Why Reddit uses Python

During Steve Huffman’s and Alexis Ohanian’s Pycon Keynote , someone asked why Reddit was moved from Lisp to Python . The reason for moving wasn’t too interesting, but why they have stayed is. Steve gave two “huge” reasons Reddit continues to use Python: