Top all-time · #786
John A De Goes
Personal blog · degoes.net/articlesprogrammingstartups
John A De Goes's personal blog at degoes.net covers programming and startups. Since 2014, 82 different Hacker News readers have linked it 121 times, most often “A Splendid Scala Journey”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 38 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
John A. De Goes's FP articles, such as the glossary and modern-FP series, are linked as references for functional programming concepts; his LambdaConf statements drew heavy discussion.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Called useful references and a thorough analysis; one commenter says he writes informative FP posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 38 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The blog for technologist John A. De Goes.
Most-linked posts?
- A Splendid Scala Journey8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2023-05-19
- Descriptive Variable Names: A Code Smell8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-10-11
- A Modern Architecture for Functional Programming6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-07-28
- A Quick Glossary of Functional Programming6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-12-23
- Wrestling With Inclusion at LambdaConf5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-03-23
- Data Structures Are Antithetical to Functional Programming5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-06-09
- Modern Functional Programming: The Onion Architecture3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-09-29
- Beautiful, Simple, Testable Functional Effects for Scala3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-02-27
- Post-LambdaConf 20163 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-06-01
- Haskell's Type Classes: We Can Do Better3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-08-18
What Hacker News says?
I am completely serious. Curtis Yarvin is a bellwether - the sort of person that any group that starts excluding people for ideological disagreements, would probably exclude first precisely because his position is so problematic. So any group that accepts his technical contribution can obviously be trusted to tolerate any less-severe ideological disagreement. Conversely, any group that doesn't, especially when they…
Comment linking /articles/lambdaconf-inclusion
on “Rust Moderation Team Resigns”Submitted Twitter's Fucked as a story · 370 points
HN discussionIn functional, statically typed programmings languages, there is a pattern where business logic, including "actions", is encoded in types. This article [1] gives an example of filesystem manipulations that are encoded in a "FreeF" type. When business rules are encoded in datatypes, it's easy to check that the encoding and the transformations are complete, and the logic can easily be mock-tested. [1] http://degoes.ne…
Comment linking /articles/modern-fp
on “Ask HN: Are we overcomplicating software development?”Submitted Destroy All Ifs – A Perspective from Functional Programming as a story · 362 points
HN discussionMost guys I follow are either rust or haskell developers. @manishearth - rust - https://manishearth.github.io/ @bitemyapp - writer of haskell: first principles @bartoszmilewski - haskell - https://bartoszmilewski.com/ @jdegoes - writes informative FP blog posts - http://degoes.net/ @aaron_turon - rust - https://aturon.github.io/blog/ @pcwalton - rust @nikomatsakis - rust - http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/ @p…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted Modern Functional Programming: The Onion Architecture as a story · 283 points
HN discussionIf you want to have annotations on IO code you could get it using attributes - and you could even go further by using more precise annotations like `network`, `disk`, etc. The problem with using the type system is that now you need to account for the distinction everywhere (ex. interfaces/traits must support IO-based implementations) only to carry this metadata which should not affect the behavior. In Haskell, IO ex…
Comment linking /articles/no-effect-tracking
on “A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await”Submitted Wrestling With Inclusion at LambdaConf as a story · 181 points
HN discussionI believe Haskell is worth learning. But I don't want to spend any more time near purely functional programmers in my professional life, so I will spend some time to unfairly nitpick the article. > a lot of the new features ... are either inspired by, or at least more robustly implemented in, Haskell. This is like some programmers, who don't know much about the history of programming languages, saying Java is steali…
Comment linking /articles/no-effect-tracking
on “Why Haskell?”Submitted Final Statement on the LambdaConf Controversy as a story · 151 points
HN discussionShort variable names as "doing it wrong" depends on context. There are good reasons in math and in programming to use short names. See for example: Descriptive Variable Names: A Code Smell. http://degoes.net/articles/insufficiently-polymorphic
Comment linking /articles/insufficiently-polymorphic
on “Programming as a Way of Thinking”Submitted A Modern Architecture for FP as a story · 116 points
HN discussionJohn De Goes ( https://degoes.net/ )
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some great engineering blogs?”Submitted Haskell's Type Classes: We Can Do Better as a story · 97 points
HN discussionAlways cool to see these in action, but multiple "online desktops" have come and gone since the mid-2000s. I personally built one myself in 2010 only to realize it had been tried and failed a few times. My next instinct was that to get attention and attract users I'd need a mobile-style UI. My instincts were wrong, and your gut is right. There wasn't a strong enough use case. The motivator for these projects is typi…
Comment linking /articles/engineer-entrepreneur/
on “os.js: JavaScript Cloud/Web Desktop Platform”Submitted A Developer's Guide to Surviving the Coronapocalypse as a story · 74 points
HN discussionFeedback was solicited, but it was not a democratic process as is documented here: https://degoes.net/articles/lambdaconf-controversy I have no stake in the process here. As I said, it was clearly well thought-out. But the outcome is regrettable.
Comment linking /articles/lambdaconf-controversy
on “Scala isn't fun anymore”Submitted Is LambdaConf for Conservative Christians, Too? as a story · 69 points
HN discussionAll in one place: A Glossary of Functional Programming http://degoes.net/articles/fp-glossary by John A De Goes, keynote speaker at Scala conferences. Discussions on FP using Scala at https://www.reddit.com/r/hascalator
Comment linking /articles/fp-glossary
on “Functional programming design patterns (2015) [video]”Submitted Functional Programming Isn't the Answer (2014) as a story · 54 points
HN discussionSeems to be similar to the direction taken by John De Goes (using algebras to describe your problem domain, building programs from those algebras via free monads/applicatives/etc., interpreting those programs using natural transformations). I think there is definitely something to this kind of thinking. Both authors argue that modern programming languages do not have the best ergonomics for this style of programming…
Comment linking /articles/modern-fp-part-2
on “Functor-Oriented Programming”Submitted Personal Thoughts on the LambdaConf Controversy as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI think no, and why can be found in these articles: http://degoes.net/articles/modern-fp http://degoes.net/articles/modern-fp-part-2
Comment linking /articles/modern-fp-part-2
on “Are Monads a Waste of Time?”Submitted 10 Hard Lessons I Learned from Starting Precog as a story · 12 points
HN discussionIf you like this, you're probably also going to like Haskell/OCaml/Ada/F#/Coq (ML family of languages?): I'll leave links for Haskell since the only one of those I've tried and liked personally: https://www.haskell.org/ http://learnyouahaskell.com/ IMO Haskell is the type system you wanted Java to have, with even more strictness. While it's possible to write unsafe haskell, just about everything you will read, and t…
Comment linking /articles/newtypes-suck
on “Leveraging the type system to avoid mistakes”Submitted The Rise (& Fall?) of NoSQL as a story · 10 points
HN discussionTrue, I never implied otherwise. When I commented, I was referring to things he said in his article: https://degoes.net/articles/splendid-scala-journey
Comment linking /articles/splendid-scala-journey
on “Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field”Submitted Functional programming isn't the answer as a story · 8 points
HN discussionTrue, but his article ( https://degoes.net/articles/splendid-scala-journey ) states it is also for Scala new syntax breaking a lot of things (if I remember correctly, been a a while since I read it) and for other reasons. I also thought it was for political reasons before until I read that article back in time.
Comment linking /articles/splendid-scala-journey
on “Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field”Submitted Everything You Know About the Blockchain Is Wrong as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
