Top all-time · #486
Chris Done
Personal blog · chrisdone.comprogramming
Chris Done's personal blog at chrisdone.com covers programming. Since 2008, 119 different Hacker News readers have linked it 156 times, most often “Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Chris Done's posts for the Dijkstra essay on teaching Haskell instead of Java, the monads-are-burritos analogy, and Haskell and Emacs tooling.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- Called the favorite monad analogy, the burrito post.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2014-01-08
- German Naming Convention6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-06-07
- A tiny language called Z5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-01-01
- Client-side web programming in Haskell: A retrospective5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-07-28
- Shell-conduit: Write Shell Scripts in Haskell with Conduit4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-09-21
- An alternative Haskell home page4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-05-29
- /posts/dijkstra-haskell-java/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-04-11
- A tiny language called Z (2013)3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-07-29
- /posts/god-mode3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-06-01
- Hell: Shell Scripting Haskell Dialect3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-27
What Hacker News says?
Here's a solution to the Twitter waterflow problem with loeb: http://chrisdone.com/posts/twitter-problem-loeb
Comment linking /posts/twitter-problem-loeb
on “A spreadsheet in fewer than 30 lines of JavaScript, no library used”Submitted A modest critique of Htmx as a story · 324 points
HN discussionWould you prefer indentations and newlines? https://chrisdone.com/posts/z/
Comment linking /posts/z/
on “Show HN: Bel”Submitted A tiny language called Z as a story · 240 points
HN discussionI don't think it has anything to do with the "tier" as I believe UT Austin used Haskell because of Dijkstra: http://chrisdone.com/posts/dijkstra-haskell-java MIT has also switched to Python from Scheme
Comment linking /posts/dijkstra-haskell-java
on “What programming languages are used most on weekends?”Submitted A philosophical difference between Haskell and Lisp (2015) as a story · 238 points
HN discussione.g. http://chrisdone.com/z/ Fascinating but I don't think it has many users! A quote from that page... (Note: there are no parentheses in Z. Zero.) Which, if you think about it, is the natural grouping for the definition of the name argument syntax I gave above. To pass additional arguments to a function, the arguments are put on the next line and indented to the column of the first argument:
Comment linking /z/
on “Hy – A Lisp-flavored Python”Submitted Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001) as a story · 233 points
HN discussionAnother one: https://chrisdone.com/posts/z/
Comment linking /posts/z/
on “An Intuition for Lisp Syntax”Submitted My negative views on Rust (2023) as a story · 192 points
HN discussionThis view is obviously biased against Emacs, but I don't disagree completely with the premise. As an Emacs user, being "immediately productive" (whatever that means) is not your topmost priority. You mold your Emacs to a workflow unique to you, notice things you are doing often, add elisp functions to change it to make those things easier, and carry them with you from job to job. As your job evolves and changes, you…
Comment linking /posts/emacs-users-are-like-igor/
on “Making Emacs Popular Again”Submitted A difference between Haskell and Common Lisp as a story · 179 points
HN discussionThis appears to be a continuation of chrisdone's work on an "alternative Haskell homepage" [1], which was previously posted to HN [2]. [1] http://chrisdone.com/posts/haskell-lang [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7814354
Comment linking /posts/haskell-lang
on “The New Haskell Homepage”Submitted A tiny language called Z (2013) as a story · 165 points
HN discussionisn't that what emacs god-mode is for? http://chrisdone.com/posts/god-mode and http://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/21c49e/combining_evil...
Comment linking /posts/god-mode
on “Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim – Learning the lesson of vi”Submitted Client-side web programming in Haskell: A retrospective as a story · 163 points
HN discussionSo in some sense there are two major features of vim, one being the composable commands, and the other being the modal editing. They seem to not necessarily be related, for example there's this thing called 'god-mode'[1] for emacs which is kind of like vim's normal mode, and control becomes implicit. I haven't gotten a chance to really adapt to using it but it seems like it could bring a lot of the benefit of vim's…
Comment linking /posts/god-mode
on “Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim – Learning the lesson of vi”Submitted Fay -- A proper subset of Haskell that compiles to Javascript as a story · 157 points
HN discussionA workaround for long compile times is trying to stay withing GHCi whenever possible and reload from there. http://chrisdone.com/posts/haskell-repl http://chrisdone.com/posts/making-ghci-fast The Haxl team seem to use this strategy: "Haxl users at Facebook do a lot of development and testing inside GHCi. In fact, we’ve built a customized version of GHCi that runs code in our Haxl monad by default instead of the IO m…
Comment linking /posts/making-ghci-fast
on “The Joy and Agony of Haskell in Production”Submitted Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igors as a story · 151 points
HN discussionI think PureScript should catch on. The runtime performance story is much more predictable than Haskell, it integrates trivially with the most valuable target platform: JS, it has small output, fixes the warts of Haskell and yet is still pure. Aside from apps at work, I made some simple physics demos with it http://chrisdone.com/toys/ Perfomance seems good.
Comment linking /toys/
on “How we secretly introduced Haskell and got away with it”Submitted Dijkstra on Haskell and Java (2001) as a story · 142 points
HN discussionYou don't have to study its effect system in detail, there's not much to it. Instead of IO a you have Eff e a, where e is a record of effects, using PureScript's records support. The neat thing is that statements in the Eff monad tend to get compiled to x; y; z in the resulting JavaScript, which is great, you don't pay a performance penalty. Check out the source code in this demo: http://chrisdone.com/toys/elastic-c…
Comment linking /toys/elastic-collision-balls/
on “How we secretly introduced Haskell and got away with it”Submitted A Tour of Hell – Shell scripting Haskell dialect as a story · 139 points
HN discussion> This redesign appears to take the position: the first page on haskell.org is for people who are brand new to the language, not for people who are already learning the language or currently use the language. Correct! See here for a complete report on the motivations behind each design decision: http://chrisdone.com/posts/haskell-lang#the-audience > To me, a user of the language visits the site dozens or hundreds of…
Comment linking /posts/haskell-lang
on “The New Haskell.org”Submitted An alternative Haskell home page as a story · 136 points
HN discussionI really like the new design. The old site was certainly showing its age--very dense and hard to navigate. Never mind the lovely 1990s motif. This is far more welcoming and user-friendly, especially to those who might be curious about Haskell. It's exciting to witness Haskell gain traction within industry. Facebook announced last week that its building an entirely new Haskell team to focus on distributed systems, da…
Comment linking /posts/haskell-lang
on “The New Haskell.org”Submitted Lisk — Lisp and Haskell as a story · 99 points
HN discussionFor Rails/Play, we have three web frameworks: * Snap * Yesod * Happstack I think all of these have techniques to build web sites in a modular fashion, but I have only used Snap myself. For querying, I personally just use postgresql-simple and write SQL strings, but this tends to be a major source of runtime bugs so I'm reconsidering that. For type safe alternatives, we have things like HaskellDB ( http://chrisdone.c…
Comment linking /posts/haskelldb-tutorial
on “Learn Haskell Fast and Hard”Submitted Hulk: A Haskell IRC server as a story · 94 points
HN discussion
