Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 599 posts.

Software Engineering
571

Sylph: the programming language I want

Creating a programming language is apparently all the rage these days, and it’s got me thinking about what I would really like to see in one. I’m starting to suspect the things I want are either impossible or mutually incompatible, so I’d better write them down and let smarter people tell me why I can’t have…

574

Service-Disoriented Architecture

“You can have a second computer once you’ve shown you know how to use the first one.” -Paul Barham The first rule of distributed systems is don’t distribute your system until you have an observable reason to. Teams break this rule on the regular. People have been talking about service-oriented architecture for a long…

581

Practicing Programming (2005)

Practicing Programming Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Back in October I wrote an essay in which I compared programming to other professions. In it, I made the unsubstantiated claim that programming is unusual, in that most programmers don't practice their craft -- at least, not in any disciplined

590

Pattern: Back ends for front ends

With the advent and success of the web, the de facto way of delivering user interfaces has shifted from thick-client applications to interfaces delivered via the web, a trend that has also enabled the growth of SAAS-based solutions in general. The benefits of delivering a user interface over the web were huge …

596

The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming

The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, as originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming: 1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production. Fortunately, except for the few of us developing rocket

598

Falling Into The Pit of Success

Eric Lippert notes the perils of programming in C++: I often think of C++ as my own personal Pit of Despair Programming Language. Unmanaged C++ makes it so easy to fall into traps. Think buffer overruns, memory leaks, double frees, mismatch between allocator and deallocator, using freed memory, umpteen dozen

599

Commandos, Infantry, and Police

As I was driving home, I found myself thinking about a favorite section of the book Accidental Empires, by longtime computer journalist Robert X. Cringely. Originally published in 1993, it’s getting a little long in the tooth, but it still contains a lot of great insights about the personalities