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Babu Srinivasan
Personal blog · blog.srinivasan.bizprogrammingcareer
Babu Srinivasan's personal blog at blog.srinivasan.biz covers programming and career. Since 2010, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 4 times, most often “If you have to learn just one programming language”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Posts on functional programming, including a recursive Fibonacci example. One commenter says that example is a poor illustration of recursion and links a Haskell version as a better approach.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- If you have to learn just one programming language2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-05-13
What Hacker News says?
IIUIC, the example they give of recursively calculating the Fibonacci series is pretty much _the_ textbook example of how not to use recursion --- it's O(2^n) and doesn't use tail calls, which means it's slow and will gobble memory. Actually calculating the Fibonacci series efficiently in a non-lazy functional language looks surprisingly non-trivial. In Haskell it's pretty simple: http://blog.srinivasan.biz/software…
Comment linking /software/fibonacci-numbers-the-slow-way-or-the-fast-and-lazy-way
on “Once you go functional, you can never go back”Submitted If you have to learn just one programming language as a story · 56 points
HN discussionSubmitted If you have to learn just one programming language as a story · 35 points
HN discussionSubmitted If you have to learn just one programming language(2009) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion