Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 1,551 posts.

Software Engineering
555

UML: My Part in Its Downfall

In the last year or two there has been a slow but steady trickle of articles attempting to account for UML ’s lack of long-term success (if you have time for only one, I suggest Hillel Wayne’s article ). As fate would have it, I had some involvement in UML standardisation in the early 2000s, so I saw some of the…

561

Oberon (2009)

Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…