Programming
Links and highlights (index):
22
1The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.
-- Fred Brooks
🕑 Feb 28, 2025
3,200% CPU utilization
"I always thought of race conditions as corrupting the data or deadlocking. I never though it could cause performance issues. But it makes sense, you could corrupt the data in a way that creates an infinite loop."
A TypeScript-types-only WebAssembly runtime
"This engine was built to service a project that aimed to demonstrate why Doom can't run in TypeScript types. Well. The funny thing is.. It can."
https://github.com/MichiganTypeScript/typescript-types-only-wasm-runtime
Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Writing a regular expression engine
Examples of great URL design
Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.
-- Chris Sacca
Cold-blooded software
If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.
-- David Leinweber
"A calculator app? Anyone could make that."
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
-- Eric S. Raymond
You'll regret using natural keys
https://blog.ploeh.dk/2024/06/03/youll-regret-using-natural-keys/
Communication must be stateless in nature, such that each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server.
-- Roy Fielding
There are many terrible mistakes to make in program design, so go ahead and make them so that you understand them better.
-- Marijn Haverbeke
Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.
-- Fred Brooks
Boring tech is mature, not old
A framework can provide 90% of the features we need quickly - giving us a false sense of confidence early in the development cycle - and then be frustratingly hard when it comes to implementing the last 10%.
-- Tony Parisi
Premature abstraction is as bad as premature optimization.
-- Luciano Ramalho
I've never been a lover of existing code. Code by itself almost rots and it’s gotta be rewritten. Even when nothing has changed, for some reason it rots.
-- Ken Thompson
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
-- Niklaus Wirth
The real problem with throwaway code comes when it isn't thrown away.
-- Joseph Yoder
Program designers have a tendency to think of the users as idiots who need to be controlled. They should rather think of their program as a servant, whose master, the user, should be able to control it.
-- John McCarthy
The 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)
🕑 Jan 9, 2025
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
🕑 Jan 8, 2025
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
🕑 Jan 8, 2025
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
🕑 Jan 7, 2025
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
🕑 Jan 7, 2025
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
🕑 Jan 6, 2025
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
🕑 Jan 5, 2025
"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 [...]"
🕑 Jan 4, 2025
Software design is knowledge building
https://olano.dev/blog/software-design-is-knowledge-building/
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557255
🕑 Jan 2, 2025
Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.
-- Kent Beck
🕑 Dec 28, 2024
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