Programming
Bits and highlights (index):
10
2The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.
-- Jeff Hammerbacher
Writing a Wasm interpreter in C
Coding is "90 percent finished" for half of the total coding time. Debugging is "99 percent complete" most of the time.
-- Fred Brooks
In JavaScript, there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders.
-- Douglas Crockford
Thoughts on the software industry
What is programming? Some people call it a science, some people call it an art, some people call it a skill. I think it has aspects of all three.
-- Charles Simonyi
"We ran out of columns" - The best, worst codebase
A skilled programmer is like a poet who can put into words those ideas that others find inexpressible.
-- Danny Hillis
In handling resources, strive to avoid disaster rather than to attain an optimum.
-- Butler Lampson
I’ve got this need to program. I wake up in the morning with sentences of a literate program. Before breakfast -- I’m sure poets must feel this -- I have to go to the computer and write this paragraph and then I can eat and I’m happy.
-- Donald Knuth
My afternoon project turned into four days of AI lies, USB chaos, and hard lessons
Dualities in functional programming
Over half of the time you spend working on a project is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you.
-- Richard P. Gabriel
JavaScript is the only language that I'm aware of that people feel they don't need to learn before they start using it.
-- Douglas Crockford
Immutability Changes Everything (Pat Helland, 2016):
web version: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2884038
pdf: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2857274.2884038
How to build your own ZX80/ZX81 and how it works:
Snowdrop OS - a homebrew operating system from scratch, in assembly language
A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet
No matter how slow you are writing clean code, you will always be slower if you make a mess.
-- Robert C. Martin
Ignore the grifters - AI isn't going to kill the software industry
Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code
A good intro to text search: https://bart.degoe.de/building-a-full-text-search-engine-150-lines-of-code/
Taking a look at compression algorithms
(dissecting various compression algorithms)
(dissecting various compression algorithms)
Out of the Tar Pit (2006)
This is one of my favorite computer science papers: https://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf
Most influential papers in computer science history
https://terriblesoftware.org/2025/01/22/the-7-most-influential-papers-in-computer-science-history/
Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.
-- Linus Torvalds
Death By Specificity (from Rich Hickey's talk Clojure Made Simple)
The computing field is always in need of new cliches: Banality sooths our nerves.
-- Alan Perlis
One man's constant is another man's variable.
-- Alan Perlis
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.
-- Alan Perlis
Think twice before you start programming or you will program twice before you start thinking.
Write your own static site generator
SQL NULLs are weird
Greppability is an underrated code metric
If, at first, you do not succeed, call it version 1.0.
-- Khayri R.R. Woulfe
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
-- John Gall
Programming is mostly thinking (2014)
https://agileotter.blogspot.com/2014/09/programming-is-mostly-thinking.html
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103407
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
-- Alan Perlis
You can't build interactive web apps except as single page applications... and other myths
Operating System in 1,000 Lines: Intro
(building a small operating system from scratch, step by step)
(building a small operating system from scratch, step by step)
Thus spake the master programmer: "A well-written program is its own heaven; a poorly-written program is its own hell."
-- Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming
Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.
-- Rob Pike
Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.
-- Rob Pike
Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy.
-- Rob Pike
Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
-- Rob Pike
Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.
-- Rob Pike
"If you've ever worked on refactoring or improving performance in a software system, you've probably run into a particular frustration: abstraction-heavy codebases. What looks like neatly organized and modularized code often reveals itself as a labyrinth, with layers [...]"
Software design is knowledge building
https://olano.dev/blog/software-design-is-knowledge-building/
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557255
Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.
-- Kent Beck
Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.
-- Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering
🕑 Dec 27, 2024
Absolutely nothing should be concluded from these figures except that no conclusion can be drawn from them.
-- Joseph L. Brothers, Linux/PowerPC Project
🕑 Dec 26, 2024
...you might as well skip the Xmas celebration completely, and instead sit in front of your linux computer playing with the all-new-and-improved linux kernel version.
-- Linus Torvalds
🕑 Dec 25, 2024
Why is more important than how.
-- The second law of software architecture
🕑 Dec 23, 2024
Everything in software architecture is a trade-off.
-- The first law of software architecture
🕑 Dec 22, 2024
Users are a terrible thing. Systems would be infinitely more stable without them.
-- Michael T. Nygard
🕑 Dec 21, 2024
This ‘users are idiots, and are confused by functionality’ mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.
-- Linus Torvalds
🕑 Dec 20, 2024
What I cannot build, I do not understand.
-- Richard Feynman
🕑 Dec 19, 2024
Well-designed components are easy to replace. Eventually, they will be replaced by ones that are not so easy to replace.
-- Sustrik's Law
🕑 Dec 18, 2024
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
🕑 Dec 17, 2024
Write a paper promising salvation, make it a 'structured' something or a 'virtual' something, or 'abstract', 'distributed' or 'higher-order' or 'applicative' and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
🕑 Jun 26, 2024
A data structure is just a stupid programming language.
-- Ralph William Gosper
🕑 Jun 20, 2024
If you have expectations (of others) that aren't being met, those expectations are your own responsibility. You are responsible for your own needs. If you want things, make them.
-- Rich Hickey (from Open Source is Not About You)
🕑 Jun 14, 2024
Programming languages, like pizza, come in only two sizes: too big and too small.
-- Richard Pattis
🕑 May 10, 2024
Software obeys the law of gaseous expansion - it continues to grow until memory is completely filled.
-- Larry Gleason
🕑 Apr 26, 2024
Threads and signals are a platform-dependant trail of misery, despair, horror and madness.
-- Anthony Baxter
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.
-- P. J. Plauger, Computer Language, March 1983
🕑 Apr 19, 2024
The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
-- Alan Kay
🕑 Apr 17, 2024
When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.
-- Rob Pike
🕑 Apr 15, 2024
Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn’t clarify the meaning, it destroys it.
-- Clay Shirky
🕑 Apr 14, 2024
Life is too short to run proprietary software.
-- Bdale Garbee
🕑 Apr 11, 2024
An evolving system increases its complexity unless work is done to reduce it.
-- Meir Lehman
🕑 Apr 10, 2024
Nobody wants to program with mutable strings anymore, why do you want to program with mutable collections?
-- Rich Hickey
🕑 Apr 9, 2024
Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
-- Frederick P. Brooks
🕑 Apr 8, 2024
You want to make your way in the CS field? Simple. Calculate rough time of amnesia (hell, 10 years is plenty, probably 10 months is plenty), go to the dusty archives, dig out something fun, and go for it. It’s worked for many people, and it can work for you.
-- Ron Minnich
🕑 Apr 5, 2024
> What does tomorrow's unix look like?
I'm confident that tomorrow's Unix will look like today's Unix, only cruftier.
-- Russ Cox
🕑 Apr 4, 2024
Our programming house is like a hoarder's delight: there's too much stuff in it everything is too big. We need too many people to do basic things.
-- Rich Hickey
🕑 Apr 3, 2024
The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard to pay.
-- Tony Hoare
🕑 Apr 2, 2024
The secret to building large apps is never build large apps. Break your applications into small pieces. Then, assemble those testable, bite-sized pieces into your big application.
-- Justin Meyer
🕑 Apr 1, 2024
Increasingly, people seem to interpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling - the incomprehensible should cause suspicion, not admiration. Possibly this results from the mistaken belief that using a mysterious device confers [extra] power on the user.
-- Niklaus Wirth
🕑 Mar 31, 2024
Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
-- Linus Torvalds
🕑 Mar 30, 2024
The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take.
-- Roy Carlson
🕑 Mar 29, 2024
Be careful to preserve the orthogonality of your system as you introduce third-party toolkits and libraries. Choose your technologies wisely.
-- Andy Hunt
🕑 Mar 28, 2024
That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything, and they don't drink all your beer.
-- Paul Leary
🕑 Mar 26, 2024
A generalist is a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, whereas a generalizing specialist is a jack-of-all-trades and master of a few. Big difference.
-- Scott Ambler
🕑 Mar 23, 2024
So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two things.
-- Ryan Singer
🕑 Mar 21, 2024
The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
🕑 Mar 18, 2024
Premature optimizations can be troublesome to revert, but premature generalizations are often near impossible.
-- Emil Persson
🕑 Mar 17, 2024
Tests are the Programmer's stone, transmuting fear into boredom.
-- Kent Beck
🕑 Mar 16, 2024
Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people’s mistakes.
-- David Wheeler
🕑 Mar 15, 2024
The cost of adding a feature isn’t just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. […] The trick is to pick the features that don’t fight each other.
-- John Carmack
🕑 Mar 14, 2024
The first rule of functions is that they should be small. The second rule of functions is that they should be smaller than that.
-- Robert C. Martin
🕑 Mar 13, 2024
It can be better to copy a little code than to pull in a big library for one function. Dependency hygiene trumps code reuse.
-- Rob Pike
🕑 Mar 12, 2024
Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.
-- Burt Rutan
🕑 Mar 11, 2024
The standard rule is, when you're in a hole, stop digging; that seems not to apply [to] software nowadays.
-- Ron Minnich