Programming
Links and highlights (feed index: Bits):
6
3The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything
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
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
Plain Vanilla - an explainer for web development using only vanilla techniques. No tools, no frameworks — just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Writing Toy Software Is A Joy
Why you should write more toy programs
Why I don't ride the AI Hype Train
https://mertbulan.com/2025/06/26/why-i-dont-ride-the-ai-hype-train/
Writing code was never the bottleneck
https://ordep.dev/posts/writing-code-was-never-the-bottleneck
Debugging time increases as a square of the program’s size.
-- Chris Wenham
Product Pseudoscience
🕑 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
The problem is that coding isn’t fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can’t write the library yourself.
-- Donald Knuth
I’ll throw away code as soon I want to add something to it and I get the feeling that what I have to do to add it is too hard.
-- Ken Thompson
Cognitive load is what matters
One of the greatest joys in computer programming is discovering a new, faster, more efficient algorithm for doing something — particularly if a lot of well-respected people have come up with worse solutions.
-- Danny Hillis
Bet on systems, not sparks
The efficiency of the code decreases with an increase in the number of people working on the program. The most efficient programs are written by a single person.
-- Charles Simonyi
The 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
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
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
🕑 Jan 21, 2025
Death By Specificity (from Rich Hickey's talk Clojure Made Simple)
🕑 Jan 21, 2025
The computing field is always in need of new cliches: Banality sooths our nerves.
-- Alan Perlis
🕑 Jan 20, 2025
One man's constant is another man's variable.
-- Alan Perlis
🕑 Jan 19, 2025
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.
-- Alan Perlis
🕑 Jan 30, 2024
Think twice before you start programming or you will program twice before you start thinking.
🕑 Jan 18, 2025
Write your own static site generator
🕑 Jan 17, 2025
SQL NULLs are weird
🕑 Jan 14, 2025
Greppability is an underrated code metric
🕑 Jan 14, 2025
If, at first, you do not succeed, call it version 1.0.
-- Khayri R.R. Woulfe
🕑 Jan 13, 2025
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
🕑 Jan 11, 2025
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
🕑 Jan 11, 2025
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
-- Alan Perlis
🕑 Jan 10, 2025
You can't build interactive web apps except as single page applications... and other myths
🕑 Jan 9, 2025
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