Top all-time · #1939
humprog.org
Personal blog · humprog.org/~stephen/blogprogrammingsystems
humprog.org is a personal blog at humprog.org about programming and systems. Since 2021, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 68 times, most often “Unix, Plan 9, and the lurking Smalltalk [pdf]”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Stephen Kell's humprog.org pages for systems research on Unix, C and Smalltalk-style late binding, mainly papers such as 'Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk' and 'Some Were Meant for C'.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Liballocs work and talks 'interesting'; 'Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk' a 'decent paper' and recommended.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Unix, Plan 9, and the lurking Smalltalk [pdf]7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-10-06
- Some Were Meant for C (2017) [pdf]6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-10-27
- Reversing Abstractions: An Existential Crisis3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-01-26
- Some Were Meant for C – Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-11-14
- Tracing system calls in-process, using a chain loader2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-15
- How to wrap a C compiler and preprocessor, really2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-28
- The operating system: should there be one? (2013) [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-12
- A tiny self-remaking C program2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-06
- Source-Level Debugging of Compiler-Optimised Code: Ill-Posed, but Not Impossible [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-07
- Software substrates: should there be only one? [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-09-24
What Hacker News says?
You might find this work and talks on liballocs by Stephen Kell interesting. The pitch is how to enable smalltalk like reflection for unix as it exists today. https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/#works-in-progress
Comment linking /~stephen/
on “--libcurl”Submitted A tiny self-remaking C program as a story · 119 points
HN discussionDon't overlook books that are critical of engineering as it is often practiced and how it fits into our society: Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum (1976). Weizenbaum wrote Eliza, the first AI chatbot, almost sixty years ago and was appalled at the reception. This book is still very pertinent, especially the Introduction, Chapter 1 On Tools, chapter 9, Incomprehensible Programs, and chapter 10, Aga…
Comment linking /~stephen//research/talks/kell19software-slides.pdf
on “Ask HN: Good books on philosophy of engineering?”Submitted How to wrap a C compiler and preprocessor, really as a story · 78 points
HN discussionI also enjoy a bit of green-field coding in C. https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/research/papers/kell17some-...
Comment linking /~stephen/research/papers/kell17some-preprint.pdf
on “C isn't a programming language anymore”Submitted I'm starting to suspect my work is incompatible with a full-time academic job as a story · 75 points
HN discussionI actually read a decent paper on that a while back Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/research/papers/kell19unix-... Late binding is a bit out of fashion these days but it really brings a lot of cool benefits for composition.
Comment linking /~stephen/research/papers/kell19unix-personal.pdf
on “The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]”Submitted Flat vs. segmented memory – it's recursive as a story · 53 points
HN discussionWhenever I read news about the kernel surfacing more traditionally OS level features to user space, I'm reminded of Stephen Kell's "Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk"[1]. There are a lot of parallels between the Smalltalk VMs (where nearly everything about the system is editable and accessible to the user) and where Linux is heading in certain respects, except going there by a very round-about way and relying o…
Comment linking /~stephen//research/papers/kell19unix-personal.pdf
on “Use of eBPF in CPU Scheduler”Submitted Motto: Unsafe languages allow mostly-safe implementations as a story · 51 points
HN discussion> Thats kind of just redefining the OS though, and what a programming language is. Well, yes. I am not deeply knowledgeable about the detailed history of Smalltalk, but my impression is that Alan Kay had the ideas and Ingalls wrote the code and made it work. He may be excused some bias. :-) > You could argue that an OS is just another high level virtual machine. Hmmmm. I think it depends on the OS. OTOH, and I read…
Comment linking /~stephen/research/papers/kell19unix-personal.pdf
on “BareMetal OS”Submitted Some Were Meant for C (2017) [pdf] as a story · 20 points
HN discussion(author here) It's an old name for an old concept :) See the previous post The Internet Was Designed With a Narrow Waist , especially the appendix with some history https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html The name was apparently coined by Jon Postel in the late 1970's, but this fact is not well known. There are some misattributions in the appendix I apparently learned the term from a talk by Van Jacobsen…
Comment linking /~stephen/research/papers/kell13operating.pdf
on “A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture (2022)”Submitted In Search of Types (2014) [pdf] as a story · 16 points
HN discussionYou might be interested in this paper: "Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk" ( https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/research/papers/kell19unix-... ) Cuis Smalltalk and related implementations are rather self-contained systems to the point they seemed walled off from the rest of the system, making it difficult to develop Smalltalk programs using external tools. However, there's something compelling about the idea of a…
Comment linking /~stephen/research/papers/kell19unix-personal.pdf
on “Smalltalk-78 Xerox NoteTaker in-browser emulator”Submitted LLMs exploit our tolerance for sloppiness as a story · 12 points
HN discussionPeople use C not because they like it, but because its the lingua franca [1]. As long as The Unix Programming Environment [2] remains dominant, The C Programming Language [3] will too. 1. https://humprog.org/~stephen/research/papers/kell17some-prep... 2. https://amazon.com/dp/013937681X 3. https://amazon.com/dp/0131103628
Comment linking /~stephen/research/papers/kell17some-preprint.pdf
on “Ported freetype, fontconfig, harfbuzz, and graphite to Fil-C”Submitted How and why to do link-time symbol wrapping (or not?) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionsorry about the misleading title choice; it’s quoted from the author’s homepage in reference to this work: https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/ also, could be marked [2017]
Comment linking /~stephen/
on “Motto: Unsafe languages allow mostly-safe implementations”Submitted Unix, Plan 9, and the lurking Smalltalk [pdf] as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYour mention of a "universal API" reminded me of the paper "Some Were Meant for C" [1] in which the author argues that one of the most important feature of C is its "communicative design", i.e., its ability to manipulate any memory -- whether this memory originates from the program or is foreign -- with the usual C operators (+, *, [], <<, >>, etc.) [1] https://www.humprog.org/~stephen//research/papers/kell17some...
Comment linking /~stephen//research/papers/kell17some-preprint.pdf
on “Why Rust is worse than C for programming low-level hw”Submitted Writing a preloadable malloc in Rust, using MMTk as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI can recommend Stephen Kell's publications on this topic, e.g. "Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk": https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/research/papers/kell19unix-... Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwicN2u6Dro More on Stephen's research can be found at https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/
Comment linking /~stephen/
on “Smalltalk-80 on Raspberry Pi: A Bare Metal Implementation”Submitted Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language (2017) [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYour intuition is not right, I have plenty of experience with REPL-driven development, even having used all the tools you have mentioned in your post. (and Clojure Spec is exactly the runtime specification part I was referring to in my comment...) Logically, it's more the other way around - REPLs are in that sense a compensation for static types, since nothing forbids having a REPL and static types (see: eg. Julia.…
Comment linking /~stephen/research/papers/kell19unix-personal.pdf
on “Use Boring Languages with LLMs”Submitted Flat vs. segmented memory – it's recursive as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis thread reminds me of the essay, "Some were meant for C" https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/research/papers/kell17some-...
Comment linking /~stephen/research/papers/kell17some-preprint.pdf
on “Strlcpy and strlcat added to glibc 2.38”Submitted Interposing on clone() system calls in-process, from Linux userspace as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPart 1: https://www.humprog.org/%7Estephen/blog/research/system-call...
Comment linking /%7Estephen/blog/research/system-call-instrumentation-on-intel-negative-result.html
on “System call instrumentation on Linux/x86-64 using memory-indirect calls”Submitted Self-rebuilding programs done slightly better as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
