Hacker News with Generative AI: Software Design

Why Algebraic Effects? (antelang.org)
Algebraic effects1 (a.k.a. effect handlers) are a very useful up-and-coming feature that I personally think will see a huge surge in popularity in the programming languages of tomorrow.
Programming Languages, Software Design, Functional Programming
293 points by jiggawatts 38 days ago | 199 comments
MCP Is Not Good, Yet (cra.mr)
Something’s been bothering me lately surrounding the conversation of MCP servers. Everyone, seemingly, is talking about how MCPs are great, and we should be building MCPs, and adopting MCPs, and rethinking UIs with MCPs, becoming best friends with MCPs, getting married to MCPs, you know, the works.
Software, User Interfaces, Software Design
4 points by vortex_ape 54 days ago | 0 comments
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiple Dispatch in Julia (2019) (youtube.com)
Programming Languages, Julia, Software Design
22 points by fuzztester 58 days ago | 3 comments
Programming languages should have a tree traversal primitive (tylerglaiel.com)
There should be a control flow construct in programming languages that can handle tree-like traversal in a nice way, similar to how for/foreach loops can handle linear traversal. It's a bit of a missing gap in the current set of control flow constructs most languages these days have settled on. Its a thing I end up having to do *all the time* and it seems like there should be some shortcuts for it.
Programming Languages, Software Design, Control Flow, Data Structures
288 points by azhenley 62 days ago | 201 comments
Unlocking Ractors: Object_id (byroot.github.io)
In a previous post about ractors, I explained why I think it’s really unlikely you’d ever be able to run an entire application inside a ractor, but that they could still be situationally very useful to move CPU-bound work out of the main thread, and to unlock some parallel algorithm.
Programming, Parallel Computing, Concurrency, Performance Optimization, Software Design
78 points by ksec 64 days ago | 0 comments
Layered Design in Go (jerf.org)
This post will describe how I design my programs in Go. I needed this for work, and while I searched for a link, nothing quite fits my coding practices out there. The word “Layered” can pull up some fairly close descriptions, but I want to lay out what I do.
Go, Programming, Software Design
141 points by misonic 72 days ago | 39 comments
Software crying to have better interfaces (venam.net)
Throughout the countless years of research on this blog a common thread always comes up: Some features and toggles are often hidden under mountains of hubris that nobody understands.
Software Design, User Experience, Human-Computer Interaction
7 points by venamresm__ 73 days ago | 0 comments
Building the Hundred-Year Web Service (2024) (unplannedobsolescence.com)
My UtahJS talk, “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”, was put online this week! It’s about how to build software infrastructure that lasts a very long time.
Software Engineering, Web Development, Longevity, Architecture, Software Design
5 points by mpweiher 74 days ago | 0 comments
Library patterns: Why frameworks are evil (tomasp.net)
This article is a follow up to my previous blog post about functional library design, but you do not need to read the previous one, because I'll focus on a different topic.
Software Design, Frameworks, Libraries
36 points by kretaceous 75 days ago | 16 comments
Ask HN: Easiest and hardest concurrency models to use correctly? (ycombinator.com)
There's a lot of options for concurrency. In Python alone, you can use threads with shared memory, threads with queues, processes with queues, concurrent.futures, asyncio, trio, or AnyIO. Java now has a preview of structured concurrency and virtual threads in addition to regular threads. There's also the CSP model of Go, as well as the actor model and supervision trees of Erlang/OTP. Software transactional memory seems to be popular in the purely functional world but rare outside of it.
Concurrency, Programming Languages, Software Development, Comparison, Software Design
10 points by pkkm 85 days ago | 3 comments
Multi-threading is always the wrong design (2023) (medium.com)
Say what you want about Node.js. It sucks, a lot. But it was made with one very accurate observation: multithreading sucks even more.
Programming, Software Design, Node.js, Multithreading
33 points by gw2 89 days ago | 52 comments
John Ousterhout and Robert Martin Follow-Up to Aposd vs. Clean Code [video] (youtube.com)
Software Development, Programming, Best Practices, Software Design
17 points by funcimp 91 days ago | 0 comments
The Gang of Four is wrong and you don't understand delegation (2012) (saturnflyer.com)
The Gang of Four got it wrong. Ruby's standard library has it wrong. Rails has it wrong.
Programming, Software Design, Ruby, Object-Oriented Programming
28 points by Tomte 96 days ago | 54 comments
Not OK Cupid – A story of poor email address validation (fastmail.com)
I don’t usually like to call out the bad behaviour of specific companies, but the egregious mis-design and lack of acknowledging it justify this case.
Email Security, User Experience, Online Dating, Software Design
129 points by brongondwana 101 days ago | 118 comments
Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful (2018) (vorpus.org)
Every concurrency API needs a way to run code concurrently.
Concurrency, Programming Languages, Go, Software Design
6 points by HAMSHAMA 103 days ago | 1 comments
My 10 Commandments of Software Design (Inspired by John Ousterhout) (igbanam.com)
This should not have been a book — for many reasons — could as well have been a bullet list. The summary I have at the end of this article is the whole book. Skip there if you don’t care about my reasoning.
Software Design, Programming, Principles, Opinions, Books
9 points by nomilk 106 days ago | 3 comments
Great software design looks underwhelming (seangoedecke.com)
Years ago I spent a lot of time reviewing coding challenges. The challenge itself was very straightforward - building a CLI tool that hit an API and allowed the user to page through and inspect the data. We allowed any language, so I saw all kinds of approaches1. At one point I came across a challenge I thought was literally perfect.
Software Design, User Interface, Programming, Coding Challenges, API
102 points by pierremenard 115 days ago | 15 comments
Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design (github.com/johnousterhout)
Software Design, Programming, Philosophy
488 points by recursivedoubts 126 days ago | 542 comments
Subverting Control with Weak References (jlongster.com)
Weak references are neat. The best language features unlock different kinds of abstractions, and weak references do exactly that. Let me show you why.
Programming, Software Design, Memory Management
5 points by gnabgib 126 days ago | 0 comments
John Ousterhout and Uncle Bob discuss John's disagreements with Clean Code (github.com/johnousterhout)
Software Development, Programming, Clean Code, Software Design
14 points by discreteevent 126 days ago | 2 comments
Every line is a potential bug (2009) (teamten.com)
Every line of code you write is a potential bug. Do not write any line of code unless you absolutely need it right now and your program will suffer for the lack of it. Do not write routines speculatively. Do not write abstraction layers you don’t need right now. If an optimization will add any complexity whatsoever, even a subtraction, resist it.
Software Development, Programming, Code Optimization, Software Design
55 points by ingve 126 days ago | 58 comments
Some Programming Language Ideas (davidbos.me)
This post is me writing down some ideas for programming languages or programming language features.
Programming Languages, Software Design
118 points by toteloader 129 days ago | 26 comments
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 131 days ago | 8 comments
Open and closed universes (2021) (sunshowers.io)
Type systems are tools for modeling some aspect of reality. Some types need to represent one of several different choices.
Type Systems, Programming Languages, Software Design
27 points by chautumn 132 days ago | 4 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 145 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 147 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 151 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 172 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 174 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 181 days ago | 118 comments