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Mark Jason Dominus

Personal blog · perl.plover.comprogrammingwriting

Mark Jason Dominus writes M-J. Dominus Perl Paraphernalia, a personal blog at perl.plover.com about programming and writing. Since 2007, 81 different Hacker News readers have linked it 134 times, most often ““Design Patterns” Aren't (2002)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.

No feed foundVisit the blog
134mentions?
10recommend?
81HN people?
2007–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 19 in 2011

Sometimes recommended · 10 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?

Why HN links it

HN readers cite Mark Jason Dominus's perl.plover.com for proofs that regex matching with backreferences is NP-hard, continued fraction arithmetic, presentation advice and his Git and design writing.

Recommended for · 10 comments
Called accessible, friendly and quite good; one commenter's favorite; presentation advice worth giving a try

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?

  1. “Design Patterns” Aren't (2002)
    5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2008-08-23
  2. /yak/cftalk/
    5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-07-07
  3. Twelve Views of Mark Jason Dominus (2003)
    4 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2011-01-21
  4. /yak/presentation/
    4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2008-05-17
  5. /NPC/
    4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-06-27
  6. “Design Patterns” Aren't
    4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-03-14
  7. Conference Presentation Judo
    4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-07-19
  8. /NPC/NPC-3SAT.html
    3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-10-15
  9. How Regexes Work
    3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-04-15
  10. Continued Fraction Arithmetic (1972)
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-01-04

What Hacker News says?

  1. rustybolt · 2025-02-16
    Nice story. An even more powerful way to express numbers is as a continued fraction ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fraction ). You can express both real and rational numbers efficiently using a continued fraction representation. As a fun fact, I have a not-that-old math textbook (from a famous number theorist) that says that it is most likely that algorithms for adding/multiplying continued fractions do n…

    Comment linking /yak/cftalk/INFO/gosper.txt

    on ““A calculator app? Anyone could make that””
  2. Tomte · 2016-11-01

    Submitted “Design Patterns” Aren't (2002) as a story · 310 points

    HN discussion
  3. burntsushi · 2020-02-25
    Nope. That still supports backreferences, and resolving backreferences is an NP-complete problem.[1] And I don't see anything in that paper that addresses that. Note that there may be some versions of the problem that maybe aren't NP-complete[2], but again, not addressed by that paper. Besides, that paper was published 12 years ago. Where is the productionized version of it? Or are you suggesting the the OP go spend…

    Comment linking /NPC/NPC-3SAT.html

    on “Show HN: Search code in GitHub repos using regular expressions”
  4. Tomte · 2021-03-07

    Submitted “Design Patterns” Aren't (2002) as a story · 141 points

    HN discussion
  5. svat · 2019-01-16
    My recommendations: * Git From the Bottom Up: https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/ (PDF: http://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/git.from.bottom.up.pdf ) (See also: "Linus Torvalds' greatest invention": http://perl.plover.com/yak/git/ ) Once your mental model matches the program, you'll be able to understand everything, hack your own solutions if necessary, etc. * Learn Git Branching: https://learngitbranching.…

    Comment linking /yak/git/

    on “How to teach Git”
  6. progga · 2011-11-05

    Submitted Why Lisp Will Never Win (2003) as a story · 126 points

    HN discussion
  7. klyrs · 2021-03-01
    Depends what you mean by "regular expression," but matching in perl regexps is NP-Hard. https://perl.plover.com/NPC/

    Comment linking /NPC/

    on “Parsing can become accidentally quadratic because of sscanf”
  8. aleyan · 2022-11-12

    Submitted How Regexes Work as a story · 73 points

    HN discussion
  9. adrianmonk · 2020-04-15Recommends
    This was what made it all make sense for me: https://perl.plover.com/Regex/article.html

    Comment linking /Regex/article.html

    on “Regex2fat: Turn your favorite regex into FAT32”
  10. henning · 2011-06-20

    Submitted Design patterns aren't as a story · 69 points

    HN discussion
  11. gbacon · 2019-09-08
    Regex matching with backreferences is NP-hard. https://perl.plover.com/NPC/

    Comment linking /NPC/

    on “Is there a regular expression to detect a valid regular expression?”
  12. thunderbong · 2022-09-06

    Submitted Conference Presentation Judo as a story · 50 points

    HN discussion
  13. bmn__ · 2022-03-14
    > there's a richer and deeper constellation of ideas and philosophy and design strategies in the original material Explanation with a bit more details: https://perl.plover.com/yak/design/

    Comment linking /yak/design/

    on “Python Design Patterns (2018)”
  14. brudgers · 2015-09-15

    Submitted Perl Regular Expression Matching Is NP-Hard as a story · 44 points

    HN discussion
  15. sleepydog · 2020-08-08
    This is not mine, but you reminded me of the story of the author of Higher Order Perl, who made a program to generate quilt designs to impress his girlfriend. https://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/notes.html#sl-2

    Comment linking /yak/12views/samples/notes.html

    on “Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?”
  16. windsurfer · 2009-05-09

    Submitted Infrequently Asked Questions about Perl as a story · 35 points

    HN discussion
  17. neilk · 2011-12-12
    Mark-Jason Dominus did this for Perl, more than a decade ago. http://perl.plover.com/lambda/ aka "How to write a 163 line program to compute 1+1" Although I really like the OP's approach since he slowly morphs a program his readers can understand, rather than constructing a programming system from scratch.

    Comment linking /lambda/

    on “Programming With Nothing: FizzBuzz in the lambda calculus in Ruby”
  18. initself · 2008-08-23

    Submitted "Design Patterns" Aren't as a story · 35 points

    HN discussion
  19. pmontra · 2016-11-01
    The key slide is http://perl.plover.com/yak/design/samples/slide011.html My understanding is that Alexander's patterns applied to software would be the typical components of a software system (DB, queue, API, etc). The GoF patterns are about how to build those components. They are lower level. We need both, but don't we already have both?

    Comment linking /yak/design/samples/slide011.html

    on ““Design Patterns” Aren't (2002)”
  20. Tomte · 2021-03-23

    Submitted Twelve Views of Mark Jason Dominus (2003) as a story · 15 points

    HN discussion
  21. kornish · 2016-11-01
    The core points of this talk, as noted in the Addendum [0], is that "we need to take a fresh look at Christopher Alexander". Since that point has been established, it would make a phenomenal follow-up talk to take Alexander's book, which is from the 1970s, and begin a discourse on how his ideas can be applied to modern software engineering and architecture. While the reader takes away from the slides that Alexander…

    Comment linking /yak/design/samples/note.html

    on ““Design Patterns” Aren't (2002)”
  22. jwmerrill · 2016-01-04

    Submitted Continued Fraction Arithmetic (1972) as a story · 15 points

    HN discussion
  23. cafard · 2018-07-19Recommends
    Have a look at https://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/

    Comment linking /yak/presentation/

    on “Ask HN: What are the things keep in mind while giving/preparing for a tech talk?”
  24. RiderOfGiraffes · 2009-09-07

    Submitted Writing Automated Tests as a story · 15 points

    HN discussion
  25. contravariant · 2022-01-24Recommends
    You're assuming that the period will remain of manageable size. I see no reason why this should be the case. Edit: Also found a more accessible website describing how to do arithmetic with continued fractions: https://perl.plover.com/yak/cftalk/ . In case anyone wants to try it out.

    Comment linking /yak/cftalk/

    on “A surprisingly hard CS problem: sums of square roots (2018)”
  26. Tomte · 2019-01-24

    Submitted Twelve Views of Mark Jason Dominus (2003) as a story · 12 points

    HN discussion
  27. mgurlitz · 2011-07-22Recommends
    And if you read the rest of the presentation, don't forget to read along with his notes http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/notes.html#s...

    Comment linking /yak/presentation/samples/notes.html

    on “What everyone should know about the human eye”
  28. Tomte · 2015-08-05

    Submitted Twelve Views of Mark Jason Dominus (2003) as a story · 12 points

    HN discussion
  29. btilly · 2011-07-22Recommends
    The information about faces and direction of gaze leads to an important tip on presentations. Always choose images that are facing your text. Flip the image if necessary to make it happen. See http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/slide023.htm... for an example of this advice being given. (And read the rest of that presentation if you have to give presentations - it is quite good.)

    Comment linking /yak/presentation/samples/slide023.html

    on “What everyone should know about the human eye”
  30. mqt · 2007-12-03

    Submitted How Regexes Work as a story · 10 points

    HN discussion

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