Top all-time · #1343
Jay Fields
Personal blog · blog.jayfields.comprogrammingcareer
Jay Fields's personal blog at blog.jayfields.com covers programming and career. Since 2007, 52 different Hacker News readers have linked it 93 times, most often “REPL Driven Development”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jay Fields' posts on Ruby, Clojure and testing, such as the Ruby inject explainer and the 'Net Negative Producing Programmers' essay on weak developers.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- Described as an excellent collection of Ruby blog posts, particularly useful for Ruby testing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
experiences in software development
Most-linked posts?
- REPL Driven Development3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-01-28
- The Cost of Net Negative Producing Programmers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-01-06
- Is Productivity Killing Your Creativity?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-06-12
- The Case for Buying Technical Books2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-08-25
- Life After Pair Programming2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-08-30
- /2010/07/clojure-destructuring.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-08-03
- The Single Best Thing For My Career2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-31
- Ruby: Inject (2008)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-04-23
- Thoughts on Developer Testing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-02-05
What Hacker News says?
That is pure and utter FUD I'm afraid. My team has been working with Clojure for over 8 years now. We have tons of code in production, and we don't have any problems maintaining these projects. Furthermore, there's absolutely no empirical evidence to support the notion that static typing results in statistically significant reduction in defects, speed of development, or ease of maintenance. Considering how long both…
Comment linking /2014/01/repl-driven-development.html
on “A Year in Clojure”Submitted Linux Commands for Developers as a story · 98 points
HN discussionWorked with static typing for about a decade primarily with Java in the enterprise. However, I've also used Haskell and Scala which have advanced type systems. I moved to work with Clojure about 8 years ago, and I don't miss types. If I did, I would've gone back to a typed language a long time ago. My experience is that dynamic typing is problematic in imperative/OO languages. One problem is that the data is mutable…
Comment linking /2014/01/repl-driven-development.html
on “Clojure 1.9 is now available”Submitted The Case for Buying Technical Books as a story · 77 points
HN discussionSomething that I only realised the other day which made me feel kinda embarrassed: in ruby, the reduce method is called inject. For years I've been doing MapReduce functions, without realising it. MapReduce was in my mental pile of "genius things that cleverer people than me do, must be looked into when there is time." For info on inject: http://blog.jayfields.com/2008/03/ruby-inject.html
Comment linking /2008/03/ruby-inject.html
on “Joel Spolsky: Can your programming language do this?”Submitted How I Open Source as a story · 77 points
HN discussionWhether to pass in a single dict/object/map/assoc-list or individually separated arguments is a tale as old as LISP (JS has some FP roots if you squint hard enough) and most LISPs (and JS has started doing this as well) mitigates this with destructuring: Common Lisp: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node252.html Clojure: http://blog.jayfields.com/2010/07/clojure-destructuring.html JS: https://simonsmit…
Comment linking /2010/07/clojure-destructuring.html
on “Don't let dicts spoil your code (2020)”Submitted Clojure & Java Interop as a story · 64 points
HN discussion> What we call technical debt is really best analogous to an uncovered short sale Steve Freeman famously described it as an unhedged call option: https://jaxenter.com/bad-code-isnt-technical-debt-103059.htm... The key difference between a short position and a call option is that the former is linear, whereas the latter is not: if things let a little bit worse, a short will lose a little bit of money, whereas a call…
Comment linking /2011/03/types-of-technical-debt.html
on “Towards an understanding of technical debt (2016)”Submitted Year Five as a story · 60 points
HN discussionNo hate for consultants from me. The opposite, actually: http://blog.jayfields.com/2012/05/single-best-thing-for-my-c... Consultants should write books, but I believe we'd all benefit if non-consultants wrote books as well.
Comment linking /2012/05/single-best-thing-for-my-career.html
on “The Case for Buying Technical Books”Submitted Clojure's Destructuring as a story · 47 points
HN discussionThis is great, and it is also worth reading "Destructuring in Clojure and Ruby": http://eyeofthesquid.com/blog/2013/09/29/destructing-in-ruby... which has some great comparisons. As it says: "As with many things in Ruby, the better question than “Can it be done this way?” is “Is it wise?”. " There is a lot that you can do in Ruby that is more gracefully done in Clojure. Brian Carper brings this out even more clearly…
Comment linking /2010/07/clojure-destructuring.html
on “Clojure Destructuring Tutorial and Cheat Sheet”Submitted Clojure: Truthy and Falsey as a story · 39 points
HN discussionI've worked with many kinds of statically typed languages, including Java, Haskell, and Scala for nearly a decade. I ultimately found that static typing introduces a lot of mental overhead in practice, and limits the way you're able to express yourself. Many dynamic patterns such as Ring middleware https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring/wiki/Middleware-Pattern... become difficult in static languages. I've been working…
Comment linking /2014/01/repl-driven-development.html
on “Idioms of Dynamic Languages”Submitted Developers needed; Hackers need not apply as a story · 38 points
HN discussionI have to agree that PP loses value when you have many senior level programmers on the team. The biggest value in PP, in my personal experience, is transfer of knowledge and experience. This applies mostly to teams with huge gaps in experience (juniors vs. seniors) or new team members that need to be caught up to speed with the codebase. If the talent level is the same (and by talent I mean having the innate passion…
Comment linking /2011/08/life-after-pair-programming.html
on “Pair Programming: The disadvantages of 100% pairing”Submitted Clojure: if-let and when-let as a story · 36 points
HN discussionVaguely interesting article to me. It's basically a reality check for this: http://blog.jayfields.com/2009/01/cost-of-net-negative-produ... In short the reasons why you a good programmer can't remove all the "bad programmers" 1. Working out who is good and bad is hard 2. It would involve too much politics that you may not be good at 3. You look like a jerk if you besmirch your co-workers 4. It's easiest for companie…
Comment linking /2009/01/cost-of-net-negative-producing.html
on “Why Net Negative Producing Programmers are Here to Stay-- Despite the Cost”Submitted Clojure: &env and &form as a story · 36 points
HN discussionJay Fields also has an excellent collection of blog posts on Ruby particularly useful stuff when you are looking into doing better Ruby testing. Some I have found interesting http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/09/rails-how-we-test.html http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/11/ruby-testing-private-metho... http://blog.jayfields.com/2007/05/ruby-unit-testing-delegati... http://blog.jayfields.com/2008/01/testing-one-expectation-p…
Comment linking /2008/01/testing-one-expectation-per-test.html
on “Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Jay Fields”Submitted The maintainability of unit tests as a story · 28 points
HN discussionThis perception even has a name: Net Negative Producing Programmers [1][2] [1] http://blog.jayfields.com/2009/01/cost-of-net-negative-produ... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NNPP
Comment linking /2009/01/cost-of-net-negative-producing.html
on “a thread”Submitted Specialize in Something Relevant as a story · 25 points
HN discussionSubmitted Refactoring: Ruby Edition available. as a story · 23 points
HN discussionSubmitted Web Sockets with Clojure and jQuery as a story · 22 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Cost of Net Negative Producing Programmers as a story · 21 points
HN discussionSubmitted Jay Fields' Thoughts: Recent Thoughts On Hiring and Being Hired as a story · 20 points
HN discussionSubmitted Jay Fields' Thoughts: Pairing isn't the Solution as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSubmitted Clojure: State Management as a story · 10 points
HN discussion
