Top all-time · #1398
Alarming Development
Personal blog · alarmingdevelopment.orgprogrammingdesign
Alarming Development is a personal blog at alarmingdevelopment.org about programming and design. Since 2008, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 82 times, most often “Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Dispatches from the User Liberation Front
Most-linked posts?
- Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-07-31
- Vulcans and Apes3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-06-02
- For the good of software, software must die3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-02-01
- At This Juncture...2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-12-03
- Gallery of programming UIs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-05-05
- The Future Programming Manifesto2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-08-27
- Turing on programming2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-06-24
- Getting to simple (2013)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-13
- New Subtext screencast: Two-Way Dataflow2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-12-02
- Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-05-27
What Hacker News says?
The link appears to have been changed, it originally pointed to http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=1068 I am not the blog author, so wished to give credit.
Comment linking /?p=1068
on “Gallery of programming UIs”Submitted The Great Software Stagnation as a story · 276 points
HN discussionVPRI's STEPS was a great research project in this direction https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=229 https://www.hackernewspapers.com/2017/1146-steps-toward-the-... But, then they published their final report.. did other stuff for a while... announced they brought together a great team with a long-term funding... and they've been doing... something? Nine years now and I haven't heard of any more progress on this front.
Comment linking /?p=229
on “The Great Software Stagnation”Submitted Programming: Attitude Trumps Intelligence as a story · 170 points
HN discussion> devs wanted to use UNIX and Perl instead of VB/Delphi What do you think drove this? Presumably plenty of people in the dark mass of 9-to-5 devs were happy with VB/Delphi. Jonathan Edwards has written [1] that VB came from "a more civilized age. Before the dark times… before the web." Did nerdy devs like me, with our adolescent anti-Microsoft attitude (speaking for myself anyway; I was born in 1980), ruin everythin…
Comment linking /?p=865
on “Transcending Posix: The End of an Era?”Submitted Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk as a story · 128 points
HN discussion[repost from blog] – This is really spot on. I would like to refer you to a couple of things that come to mind that you might find useful for advancing this line of thinking. (1) I saw a talk by Jonathan Edwards that was very much along the lines of what you wrote here: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=5 (2) Second, Christopher Alexander’s early work on patterns in architecture and urban design have been referenced…
Comment linking /?p=5
on “Research in programming languages”Submitted Version Control for Structure Editing as a story · 126 points
HN discussionInteresting arguments. Lisp Machines? "Separation of Concerns" [1]? Conway's Law? [1]: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=805
Comment linking /?p=805
on “Compilers: Incrementally and Extensibly (2024)”Submitted Beautiful Code as a story · 125 points
HN discussionGreat stuff, like all of Bret Victor's talks. My favourite: is "The Future of Programming (2013)": https://vimeo.com/71278954 (I also liked this satirical blog post about that talk: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=797 )
Comment linking /?p=797
on “Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle (2012) [video]”Submitted Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis as a story · 114 points
HN discussionSee also http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=422 ... That experience taught me a lot about what really matters in programming. It is not about solving puzzles and being the brightest kid in the class. It is about realizing that the complexity of software dwarfs even the most brilliant human; that cleverness cannot win.
Comment linking /?p=422
on “Complexity is the enemy”Submitted The Future Programming Manifesto as a story · 101 points
HN discussionI agree, the ability to connect widgets is one of my favourite aspects. It lets you create a customized for your specific needs instant feedback so you can keep changing the source and see how it affects your "calculated view." I want to be able to answer questions like: - What is the diff between the output of my program as is and at master^1 commit. Sure, I can manually copy my repo, check it out at master^1 and s…
Comment linking /?p=711
on “Conception - a live programming environment experiment after 1 year”Submitted Switching to Plan J (From Scala back to Java) as a story · 95 points
HN discussionI think the basic issue most people have with Haskell (or rather, with Haskellers) is the fetishization of 100% correctness. For most tasks, it's just not that important, and so the (considerable) extra cognitive load that Haskell imposes is a net negative. I mean, precise joinery may be superior to hammers and nails when building a house, but it's an expensive proposition, and there are 5 people in the world who ca…
Comment linking /?p=440
on “Why Haskell is suited to IO”Submitted The problem with programming and how to fix it as a story · 74 points
HN discussionThis is just bad technical writing. He is unable or unwilling or simply too lazy to produce a single concrete real-world example of the object of his high praise. He says he has found applications ranging from real-time embedded systems to library loans, so how hard would it be for him to to give a simplified version of one of those applications as an example? Heck, I'll settle for a non-real-world example, as long…
Comment linking /?p=366
on “Design to accommodate change: Table-driven programming [pdf]”Submitted An IDE Is Not Enough. as a story · 28 points
HN discussion- pj · 2009-01-31
JavaScript is /way/ better than good enough. It's terrific. It's the only programming language many people need to produce really amazing websites and web application that make the world a richer and more promising place for a lot of people. It's good enough to get you $40-50/hr easily. It's good enough to build platforms and APIs and tons of libraries given freely to the community by companies including Yahoo, Goog…
Comment linking /?p=66
on “Javascript is good enough” Submitted What if Smalltalk were invented today? as a story · 28 points
HN discussionIt's called Coherence now, but I haven't seen too much lately from it. http://alarmingdevelopment.org/ is his blog.
Comment linking /
on “Programming 2.0”Submitted Javascript is good enough as a story · 28 points
HN discussionManifesto of the Programmer Liberation Front: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=5%252523comment-151
Comment linking /?p=5%252523comment-151
on “Visual programming means anyone can be a coder”Submitted New Subtext screencast: Two-Way Dataflow as a story · 26 points
HN discussionI think the creator Jonathan Edwards has realized this. He released the source here: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=160 ... and he also said here: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=177 "I have realized that this is not going to happen inside Computer Science, at least not at first. The idea with Juncture is to build something that might be really useful, and is complete enough to allow other people to extend it."
Comment linking /?p=177
on “Hot or not: subtext programming language”Submitted Getting to simple (2013) as a story · 17 points
HN discussion> Yes, there are people who create a mess with abstraction. This happens in every language, in Java people create FactoryFactories, in Haskell people play type tetris, in Ruby, people abuse metaprogramming and in Go, I assume some people go overboard with code-gen. It's possible in any language and yet some languages' codebases are consistently worse than others ;) If you create a culture of cleverness, implicitness…
Comment linking /?p=562
on “Ten Years of “Go: The Good, the Bad, and the Meh”Submitted Observations of programmers in the wild as a story · 16 points
HN discussion
