Top all-time · #1884
Thomas Guest
Personal blog · wordaligned.org/articlesprogrammingwriting
Thomas Guest writes Word Aligned, a personal blog at wordaligned.org about programming and writing. Since 2008, 39 different Hacker News readers have linked it 47 times, most often “Essential Python Reading List”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Thomas Guest's blog covers C++ and programming practice, including a streambuf-based logger, a pi-seconds estimation trick from Programming Pearls, and reading lists. Commenters link to it as a source or reference.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A collection of articles on software development written by Thomas Guest.
Most-linked posts?
- Essential Python Reading List3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-02-10
- Longest Common Subsequence algorithm in Python2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-03-12
- Accidental Emacs: tips and tricks for the environment vi users love to hate. 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-05-15
- Programming Nirvana, Plan B2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-05-28
- Distorted Software2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-07-31
What Hacker News says?
One of these days, I really need to post my C++ logger class. Don't know if you're doing embedded C++, but I've used this class in VxWorks, and if you're not logging anything (the default build with NDEBUG does nothing), it should optimize away. For now, I can post a link to my inspiration: http://wordaligned.org/articles/cpp-streambufs Extending from there is pretty straightforward, albeit you can hit some dark cor…
Comment linking /articles/cpp-streambufs
on “-2000 lines of code”Submitted Two Star Programming as a story · 121 points
HN discussionThis convergence (deliberate or not) has been noticed. I've seen a diagram like this http://wordaligned.org/articles/programming-nirvana-plan-b but with more detail. ie. with C++, Java, Python placed in there somewhere. (probably in the linked paper, but I can't access it now)
Comment linking /articles/programming-nirvana-plan-b
on “Is Software Engineering Possible?”Submitted Next permutation: When C++ gets it right as a story · 58 points
HN discussionThere’s a fun estimation technique from Programming Pearls: pi seconds is a nano century. So, 3.14e7 seconds in a year. 80 bytes/sec * 3.14e7 sec = 2.4e9 bytes http://wordaligned.org/articles/pi-seconds
Comment linking /articles/pi-seconds
on “Wolfram Cloud”Submitted Why Python Programmers Should Learn Python as a story · 56 points
HN discussionSome valid points, but I was hoping for more meat, maybe references to what I call "dark corners" of C++. Take, for instance, writing a simple logging class that can log to multiple places and can be used in place of std::cout. The solution I initially came up with is a variation on http://wordaligned.org/articles/cpp-streambufs , with some manipulator magic thrown in to adjust severity level. Ah, but that's not goo…
Comment linking /articles/cpp-streambufs
on “The Dark Side of C++ (2007) [pdf]”Submitted Longest Common Subsequence algorithm in Python as a story · 41 points
HN discussionYeah here is one for Python: http://wordaligned.org/articles/essential-python-reading-lis...
Comment linking /articles/essential-python-reading-list
on “The Ruby Reading List”Submitted Python on Ice as a story · 30 points
HN discussion> The interface is more like printf See, I don't believe that's an improvement. Having used printf in C, I was relieved to be able to "redirect" whatever to a stream, and not care about whether it should be "%d" or "%02f" or even if it was a struct/class. On top of this, treating files as streams, strings as streams, or even extending streams to make a tee-stream[0] all seem clunkier to me with a printf like system.…
Comment linking /articles/cpp-streambufs
on “Show HN: Using C++23 <stacktrace> to get proper crash logs in C++ programs”Submitted My Secret Shame, I Still Use Subversion as a story · 16 points
HN discussionSubmitted Drawing Chess Positions with Python as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSubmitted Rewriting String.Left() as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSubmitted Power Programming - Decision Trees in C++, Python, Perl, Arc as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Description and implementation of Longest Common Subsequence in python and c++ as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Python, Surprise me as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Metaprogramming is Your Friend as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Accidental Emacs: tips and tricks for the environment vi users love to hate. as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Essential Python Reading List as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Shell Script Set Operations as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Accidental Emacs as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted When you comment on a comment as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Launching missiles and other unhappy accidents as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fixing Compiler Warnings the Hard Way as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Essential Python Reading List as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Power programming as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Steganography made simple as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Syntactic Sugar as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Should documentation be entertaining? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
