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Essays on programming I think about a lot

benkuhn.net

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Re: Essays on programming I think about a lot

#31

Post by mercer »

nordsieck wrote: post #6

Sadly it's a video/presentation, not an essay, but Simple Made Easy[1] is the single software argument that has made the most impact on me. ___ 1. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

I don't have a transcript link at hand, but as far as videos go, "Functional Core, Imperative Shell" / "Boundaries" by Gary Berhardt is also a must-see (or must-read, hopefully).

Re: Essays on programming I think about a lot

#34

Post by Cthulhu_ »

nordsieck wrote: post #6

Sadly it's a video/presentation, not an essay, but Simple Made Easy[1] is the single software argument that has made the most impact on me. ___ 1. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

I still can't believe that I was actually there during that exact presentation but at the time it didn't have the impact on me that it seems to have had on HN as a whole. Maybe I should review it again, or maybe I'm just not smart enough / don't have the right mindset, IDK.

Re: Essays on programming I think about a lot

#36

Post by bcrosby95 »

holografix wrote: post #3
simonw wrote: post #2

So glad to see the Law of Leaky Abstractions in there - that's had a very long-running impact on how I think about programming. It's still super-relevant today, nearly 18 years after it was published. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

I’m going through the conversation with a colleague atm where he believes DRY applies to everything.

The problem isn't DRY. The problem is most programmers' inability to tear down abstractions that aren't correct for your new requirements when they evolve.

Re: Essays on programming I think about a lot

#37

Post by vrnvu »

Lately I've been into what I would call "the classics", Knuth, Peter Norvig, Minsky, Dijkstra... I realised most of what nowadays is called modern software/techniques basically consist in re-framing old essays from them.

Some of my references: the famous Norvig view on design patterns [1] and also his view of clean code [2]. Knuth on programming [3] also really enlighting.

1. https://norvig.com/design-patterns/design-patterns.pdf 2. https://www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/cmsc421/norvig-lisp-style.pdf 3. http://www.paulgraham.com/knuth.html

Re: Essays on programming I think about a lot

#38

Post by dewey »

codeDruid wrote: post #19

As a less experienced web developer, i found "How I write backends"[1] very enlightening and I recommend it to all my peers when we discuss useful resources. 1. https://github.com/fpereiro/backendlore

I just read it but I think it focuses too much on specific tools (Redis, Node,...) and their configurations which might not be the best for most use cases. Especially if it's for a beginner who maybe doesn't have to start out with a load balancer and Redis.

Re: Essays on programming I think about a lot

#39

Post by mbrock »

gnud wrote: post #27
lmm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true. A lot of these abstractions are provably correct and so simply cannot leak (and in slightly more advanced languages you might even enforce those proofs - consider Idris' VerifiedMonad and friends). Of course if you put garbage in at the lower levels (e.g. define a monoid instance that doesn't actually commute) then you will get garbage out at the higher levels (e.g. the sum of the concatena…

You are abstracting over a CPU and memory. Your abstraction leaks in that memory layout actually matters for performance, for example. Or if you have a bad RAM chip.

Indeed proof formalisms are themselves leaky abstractions.
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