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A Reasonable Approximation
Personal blog · reasonableapproximation.netprogrammingmathculture
A Reasonable Approximation is a personal blog at reasonableapproximation.net about programming, math and culture. Since 2014, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite this blog's post on the Effect pattern, which sets out the author's reservations about Elm, mainly around JavaScript interop and the development model. Comments use it as a source for their own points about Elm.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
There's a lot to like about Elm, but the tradeoff is that the BDFL (Evan) has essentially abandoned public work on it [0, 1], and the community seems to be shrinking [2]. I personally wouldn't choose it for new projects, and I consider it essentially a brilliant research language (it's inspired a LOT of other UI work). 0: https://elmcraft.org/lore/elm-core-development/ 1: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/elm-th…
Comment linking /2024/11/02/elm-community-not-very-active.html
on “If not React, then what?”Submitted A reckless introduction to Hindley-Milner type inference (2019) as a story · 140 points
HN discussionAges ago I wrote a simple command that let you do shell scripting in the shebang line. http://reasonableapproximation.net/2010/07/27/silly-things-t... I'm not sure I've used it since, but I still like the xgraph thing.
Comment linking /2010/07/27/silly-things-to-do-with-shebang-lines.html
on “Shebang Quine”Submitted Classifying games like the Prisoner's Dilemma as a story · 50 points
HN discussionThat prints #!/bin/cat at the beginning, though. If I can return to overthinking it, you could use a silly tool[1] I wrote ages ago and do something like (untested) #! /usr/bin/cmd tail -n +2 1 2 fizz ... [1] http://reasonableapproximation.net/2010/07/27/silly-things-t...
Comment linking /2010/07/27/silly-things-to-do-with-shebang-lines.html
on “Overthinking Fizzbuzz with Monoids”Submitted Fascists and Rakes (2014) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionFWIW the creator of the Effect pattern has some pretty deep reservations about Elm ( http://reasonableapproximation.net/2019/10/20/the-effect-pat... ). His reservations end up being the same ones that get hashed out all the time over HN (JS interop and the development model).
Comment linking /2019/10/20/the-effect-pattern.html
on “Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI”Submitted The Farmer's Dilemma as a story · 46 points
HN discussionSubmitted Towards a Taxonomy of Logic Puzzles as a story · 20 points
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HN discussionSubmitted A half-baked idea for keeping code and docs in sync as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bsert – "better" asserts in Python as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
