Hacker News with Generative AI: Software Design

Cargo Cult Programming (wikipedia.org)
Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose.

Programming, Software Development, Software Design

7 points by KiranRao0 1 day ago | 8 comments

Go Data Structures: Interfaces (2009) (swtch.com)
Go's interfaces—static, checked at compile time, dynamic when asked for—are, for me, the most exciting part of Go from a language design point of view. If I could export one feature of Go into other languages, it would be interfaces.

Programming, Go, Software Design

99 points by rednafi 15 days ago | 72 comments

Conway's Law (2022) (martinfowler.com)
Pretty much all the practitioners I favor in Software Architecture are deeply suspicious of any kind of general law in the field. Good software architecture is very context-specific, analyzing trade-offs that resolve differently across a wide range of environments. But if there is one thing they all agree on, it's the importance and power of Conway's Law. Important enough to affect every system I've come across, and powerful enough that you're doomed to defeat if you try to fight it.

Software Architecture, Conway's Law, Software Design

26 points by yamrzou 17 days ago | 1 comments

Go Is a Well-Designed Language (mattjhall.co.uk)
Go was designed at Google, where Russ Cox, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and many others were working. Google was using Java and C++ at the time which the designers of Go felt were performant but hard to use. The compilers were slow, tooling was finicky and the languages had been designed at least a decade before. Cloud computing - large numbers of multicore servers working together - was becoming widespread.

Programming Languages, Google, Software Design

71 points by PaulHoule 21 days ago | 189 comments

Comptime as Configuration (openmymind.net)
If you look at my httpz library, you'll notice that httpz.Server(T) is a generic. The type passed to Server serves two purposes. The first is to support an application-specific context - whatever instance of T passed into Server(T).init gets passed back to your custom HTTP handlers.

Programming, Generics, Software Design, Configuration

59 points by todsacerdoti 42 days ago | 18 comments

Go Is a Well-Designed Language (mattjhall.co.uk)
Go was designed at Google, where Russ Cox, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and many others were working. Google was using Java and C++ at the time which the designers of Go felt were performant but hard to use. The compilers were slow, tooling was finicky and the languages had been designed at least a decade before. Cloud computing - large numbers of multicore servers working together - was becoming widespread.

Programming Languages, Software Design, Google

20 points by sebg 44 days ago | 22 comments

Types are a basic tool of software design (2018) (tedinski.com)
One of my pet peeves is when someone makes like they’re going to talk about software design, and then… talks about comments. Or they focus on the details about how functions get written.

Software Design, Programming, Software Development

103 points by gus_leonel 51 days ago | 118 comments

Software Design Is Knowledge Building (olano.dev)
ORG relies on an integration service, SaaS, to decouple its business logic from vendor software dealing with billing, analytics, customer management, etc.

Software Design, Knowledge Management, Integration Services, SaaS

419 points by signa11 51 days ago | 110 comments

Building a Self-Hostable Product (fusionauth.io)
In this article, you’ll learn about the architecture, business model, and software design choices necessary to create a self-hostable developer tool.

Software Design, Self-Hosting, Developer Tools, Business Models, Architecture

24 points by mooreds 55 days ago | 7 comments

Arcan as Operating System Design (2021) (arcan-fe.com)
Arcan is a single-user, user-facing, networked overlay operating system.

Operating Systems, Software Design, User Interface

30 points by Bluestein 55 days ago | 3 comments

Lua is so underrated (bearblog.dev)
The more I learn about Lua's design and implementation, the more impressed I am. It's very rare to see software that does so much with so little code.

Programming Languages, Lua, Software Design

321 points by nflatrea 56 days ago | 354 comments

Visitor Pattern Considered Pointless – Use Pattern Switches Instead (nipafx.dev)
In modern Java, the visitor pattern is no longer needed. Using sealed types and switches with pattern matching achieves the same goals with less code and less complexity.

Java, Programming, Software Design, Design Patterns

3 points by signa11 63 days ago | 0 comments

Ideas from "A Philosophy of Software Design" (16elt.com)
Almost a month ago, I created a telegram channel with the goal of reading tech books consistently, and sharing summaries of them. This week, I have finished reading the first book - “A Philosophy of Software Design” by John Ousterhout and shared all of the 21 chapter summaries in the channel.

Software Design, Book Reviews, Technology

235 points by fagnerbrack 64 days ago | 135 comments

Developing Developers (2015) (felleisen.org)
Northeastern offers a unique But see P.S. Uniqueness. curriculum on programming. Instead of the currently fashionable programming language, it focuses on explicit and systematic approaches to program design. To bring this idea across to the full range of Northeastern freshmen, the first course uses a simple teaching language that is tailored to our goals.

Programming, Education, Curriculum, Software Design, Computer Science

201 points by danielam 65 days ago | 111 comments

Ask HN: Please recommend university open courses for software design? (ycombinator.com)
Hi everyone, currently I am trying to learn software design & engineering by these mit opencourse courses

Software Design, Education, Online Courses

60 points by ryuzaka 74 days ago | 19 comments

Consider Rexx for Scripting (2022) (opensource.com)
How do you design a programming language to be powerful yet still easy to use? Rexx offers one example. This article describes how Rexx reconciles these two seemingly contradictory goals.

Programming Languages, Scripting, Open Source, Software Design

45 points by walterbell 74 days ago | 33 comments

A C++ Mixin System (jennyjams.net)
I've had this idea in the back of my head for a while of pervasively using mixins to add code and logic for more high level concepts, although this gets somewhat close to Rust style traits (and C++ concepts). This has existed in the back of my head for a long time as a way to model a framework or standard library implementaiton while also providing it for user types.

C++, Object-Oriented Programming, Design Patterns, Software Design

74 points by luu 93 days ago | 40 comments

Make It Ephemeral: Software Should Decay and Lose Data (pocoo.org)
Most software that exists today does not forget. Creating software that remembers is easy, but designing software that deliberately “forgets” is a bit more complex. By “forgetting,” I don't mean losing data because it wasn’t saved or losing it randomly due to bugs. I'm referring to making a deliberate design decision to discard data at a later time. This ability to forget can be an incredibly benefitial property for many applications. Most importantly software that forgets enables different user experiences.

Software Design, User Experience, Data Management, Ephemerality

31 points by BerislavLopac 112 days ago | 40 comments

Why doesn't Roc have a Maybe or Option or Optional, or null or nil or undefined? (roc-lang.org)
The inventor of the null reference refers to it as his "billion dollar mistake" because it "has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years."

Programming Languages, Null References, Software Design

14 points by Ciantic 119 days ago | 7 comments

Tiered support is an anti-pattern (2013) (gillardmoss.me.uk)
Back when the first internet bubble was bursting I had my first web development job. We thought we were sophisticated because we used Macromedia Drumbeat whose killer feature was, gosh, dynamic ASP and JSP websites. This put us a cut above those ‘amateurs’ who chopped huge TIFFs into static HTML using Fireworks (pfff)!

Web Development, Software Design, Anti-Patterns, History

90 points by mooreds 142 days ago | 69 comments

A word about systemd (2016) (skarnet.org)
systemd is becoming de facto a standard init system for Linux. But even this choice of words is treacherous, because systemd is much more than an init system. It's basically an integrated redesign of all the low-level userspace of a Linux system, with great plans to change how software is run and organized.

Linux, Operating Systems, Software Design, System Administration

36 points by tosh 156 days ago | 182 comments

Handling complexity without abstraction: Algebraic Bricklaying C (github.com/gritzko)

Programming Languages, C, Software Design, Complexity

43 points by gritzko 171 days ago | 6 comments

Duck typing (horror) in Go (ccampo.me)

Go Programming, Software Design, Duck Typing

50 points by thunderbong 183 days ago | 57 comments

Worse Is Better (wikipedia.org)

Software Design, Principles, Philosophy

5 points by gangorgasm 183 days ago | 1 comments

Why ADTs are good and Inheritance is bad? (stackoverflow.com)