Top all-time · #63
Programming in the 21st Century
Personal blog · prog21.dadgum.comprogrammingphilosophy
Programming in the 21st Century is a personal blog at prog21.dadgum.com about programming and philosophy. Since 2007, 459 different Hacker News readers have linked it 831 times, most often “Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Commenters link James Hague's essays on Turbo Pascal, simplicity and programming in the small, and recommend the site as one of the best blogs.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called a favourite and a good article; one commenter says the site is fast and filled with interesting content.
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?
- Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)20 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2019-06-08
- A Ramble Through Erlang IO Lists20 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2010-06-13
- Purely Functional Retrogames (2008)17 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2009-03-15
- Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2011-10-30
- A Spellchecker Used To Be A Major Feat of Software Engineering11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2008-06-08
- Functional Programming Doesn't Work (and what to do about it)10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2009-12-29
- Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2013-06-20
- Write code like you just learned how to program10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2010-12-24
- My favorite blogger of all time: dadgum and programming in the 21st century9 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-10-09
- A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-06-21
What Hacker News says?
from James Hague's blog https://prog21.dadgum.com/56.html : 8<--------------------- I still like to implement my own ideas, especially in fun languages like Erlang and Perl. I'm glad I can program, because personal programming in the small is fertile ground and tremendously useful. For starters, this entire site is generated by 269 lines of commented Perl, including the archives and the atom feed (and those 269 line…
Comment linking /56.html
on “I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file”Submitted Computer Sciences Courses That Don't Exist, but Should as a story · 415 points
HN discussion> The problem was a lot of it wasn’t job relevant and it felt very rigid, and sometimes even more complex than it needed to be. CS was born out of a time when computers were very limited. How do you write a word processor with a spell checker, when the dictionary alone won't fit on a floppy disk, or fit in memory?[1] How do you draw rounded rectangles on your GUI when they take too many CPU cycles to draw?[2] CS peo…
Comment linking /29.html
on “Teach Yourself Computer Science”Submitted Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50? as a story · 414 points
HN discussionThings That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than: http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
Comment linking /116.html
on “The Website Obesity Crisis”Submitted Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers. as a story · 399 points
HN discussion> I thought it was pretty universally agreed Depends what you consider “universally agreed”. At least one person (me) thinks that: git interface is good enough as is (function>form here), regexps are not too terse - that’s the whole point of them. Related if you squint a lot: https://prog21.dadgum.com/170.html
Comment linking /170.html
on “Programming Is Mostly Thinking (2014)”Submitted Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015) as a story · 367 points
HN discussionI don't disagree with the broader point I just think authors aren't a good example for a non-tool obsessed group of people. I read https://prog21.dadgum.com/ somewhat regularly when I think I am getting to tool obsessed.
Comment linking /
on “Software development topics I've changed my mind on”Submitted Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than as a story · 367 points
HN discussionYou're right, but it's also true that some exist. * Idle Words http://www.idlewords.com/ (while we're on this topic, http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm is worth reading) * Programming In the 21st Century http://prog21.dadgum.com/ Are both extremely fast, filled with interesting content and amazingly manage this without loading any javascript from a google domain.
Comment linking /
on “A letter about Google AMP”Submitted A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008) as a story · 363 points
HN discussionI really enjoyed https://prog21.dadgum.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted The silent majority of experts (2012) as a story · 309 points
HN discussionSo when you say "real GC, not reference counting", you have to understand that tracing GC and reference counting are duals, and every concurrent collector is going to be some hybrid of the two [1]. But there are a number of algorithms that most people would probably consider "real GC" that don't stop the world. Modern Java GCs use the train algorithm [2], which bounds pause times to some arbitrarily-sized constant.…
Comment linking /16.html
on “Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development”Submitted Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011) as a story · 297 points
HN discussionSlow programming languages battle across time: http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering: http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html
Comment linking /29.html
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted Retiring Python as a Teaching Language as a story · 280 points
HN discussionThe only semi-regularly updated ones I currently have in my RSS reader are: - James Hague's "Programming in the 21st Century": http://prog21.dadgum.com/ - Edward Z. Yang's blog: http://blog.ezyang.com/ Rest of my daily blog hits I get via Hacker News and reddit/r/haskell
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted The Silent Majority of Experts as a story · 274 points
HN discussionThe best blogs don't have daily content. In fact, the best blogs usually post once a month, or less - often much less. Here are some: http://prog21.dadgum.com http://www.moserware.com http://ridiculousfish.com/blog http://wingolog.org/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted Don't distract new programmers with OOP as a story · 248 points
HN discussionI'm excited. Not for a specific use-case, but because it removes constraints and that lets developers push the boundaries of what's possible. As a European, I predict it'll be a catalyst for American companies to rethink data caps and data pricing, as you can blow through a data cap 10x as fast. That'll be massive and measurable progress. Paraphrasing Liebig's law of the minimum[0]: progress is hindered by the most…
Comment linking /29.html
on “It's your device, you should be able to repair it”Submitted Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers as a story · 244 points
HN discussion> What set of escapes and delimiters could be simpler? Would you rather reserve certain characters, and abandon the idea of holding "just text" values? There's a lot of design room here. https://www.lua.org/pil/2.4.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/172.html I can no longer remember where I saw it (thought it was lua), but I heard the idea to use =[[ ... ]]= and =[[[ ... ]]]= as wrappers (a bit like the qq operator from…
Comment linking /172.html
on “Dangers of CSV Injection”Submitted A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of as a story · 239 points
HN discussion"Things that Turbo Pascal is smaller than" - http://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
Comment linking /116.html
on “NirSoft Freeware (2008)”Submitted Want to Write a Compiler? Read These Two Papers (2008) as a story · 237 points
HN discussionCame here to share this mandatory link on this subject, Dadgm's Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than: https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html I used Turbo Pascal 2 as late as 1991, if not later, because that was the version we had. It was really fast on a 386 40 MHz or whatever exact type of PC we had then. A bit limiting perhaps that it only came with a library for CGA graphics, but on the other hand it made everyth…
Comment linking /116.html
on “IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)”Submitted Write code like you just learned how to program as a story · 222 points
HN discussion
