Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 488 posts.

Software Engineering
436

SQLite's Use of Tcl (2017)

The design of SQLite was inspired by the design of TCL, both in the way it handles datatypes and in the formatting of its source code. The index use case for SQLite was in a Tcl/Tk application for an industrial company. From its inception, SQLite has always depended heavily on TCL. These days, SQLite no longer uses…

443

Locality of Behaviour (2020)

Carson Gross explores the Locality of Behaviour (LoB) principle, which emphasizes making the behavior of code units obvious on inspection to enhance maintainability. He discusses the tradeoffs between LoB and other software design principles like DRY and SoC, offering insights on balancing clarity, abstraction, and…