Top all-time · #2842
Ben McCormick
Personal blog · benmccormick.orgprogrammingweb
Ben McCormick's personal blog at benmccormick.org covers programming and web. Since 2012, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 135 times, most often “Learning Vim: Working with Files (curated by Ran via RefreshBox.co)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ben McCormick's posts on Vim, Atom performance and Jest testing. One commenter singles out his Jest snapshot post for its trade-offs; others cite his Vim articles as learning resources.
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.
Follow @benmccormick on Micro.blog .
Most-linked posts?
- Learning Vim: Working with Files (curated by Ran via RefreshBox.co)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-07-07
- Ten Things a Serious JavaScript Developer Should Learn3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-07-19
- Underscore vs. lodash2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-11-12
- Lessons Backbone Developers Can Learn from React2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-09-09
- ES5, ES6, ES2016, ES.Next: What's Going on with JavaScript Versioning?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-09-14
- Learning Vim in 20142 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-09-14
- Testing with Jest Snapshots: First Impressions2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-09-19
- The New Hello World2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-26
- Component Based Development and The Future Of The Web Platform2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-08-07
- ES6: The Bad Parts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-06-05
What Hacker News says?
A bunch of screencasts here: http://vimcasts.org/ And here's a post I wrote a while ago about why Vim can be so efficient: http://benmccormick.org/2014/07/16/learning-vim-in-2014-vim-...
Comment linking /2014/07/16/learning-vim-in-2014-vim-as-art/
on “Visual Studio Code 1.2 released”Submitted The Sad State of the Backbone Ecosystem as a story · 124 points
HN discussionInterestingly, in practice lo-dash actually doesn't proxy through to the native implementation for things like map and forEach. Just using loops ends up being more performant because of some edge cases in the ES5 spec for those methods that lo-dash and underscore don't follow. http://benmccormick.org/2014/11/12/underscore-vs-lodash/
Comment linking /2014/11/12/underscore-vs-lodash/
on “Lodash v3.0.0”Submitted Vim as Language as a story · 74 points
HN discussionEmacs doesn't offer a fraction of the graphical flexibility that Atom does. How would you do any of the below? https://benmccormick.org/2016/01/11/the-most-interesting-ato...
Comment linking /2016/01/11/the-most-interesting-atom-packages-ive-found-so-far/
on “The State of Atom's Performance”Submitted Understanding The Backbone Mindset as a story · 53 points
HN discussionHeres a breakdown of the differences between the two : http://benmccormick.org/2014/11/12/underscore-vs-lodash/ A few months old but should still be reasonably accurate
Comment linking /2014/11/12/underscore-vs-lodash/
on “Underscore and Lodash Merge Thread”Submitted Orthogonality and CSS in JS as a story · 38 points
HN discussionHi! I work on JavaScript Tools at FB. There is a fantastic post by Ben McCormick about the up and downsides of this system: http://benmccormick.org/2016/09/19/testing-with-jest-snapsho... Snapshots aren't the only feature of Jest; it is simply one assertion in our assertion library. There is a ton of other stuff in the framework that makes setting up a test environment and writing tests easier. My philosophy for bui…
Comment linking /2016/09/19/testing-with-jest-snapshots-first-impressions/
on “Jest – Painless JavaScript Testing”Submitted Ten Things a Serious JavaScript Developer Should Learn as a story · 21 points
HN discussionPhilosophy Of Software Design is a recent work on the subject Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Rpu6zX Book review I wrote a while back: https://benmccormick.org/2018/12/31/book-review-philosophy-o...
Comment linking /2018/12/31/book-review-philosophy-of-software-design/
on “Professional Software Development”Submitted Ten Things a Serious JavaScript Developer Should Learn as a story · 17 points
HN discussionSeveral made this point, that Backbone is stable, not abandoned. I agree! I said so in the post. My concern is with the libraries around it. I've elaborated in this followup post: http://benmccormick.org/2016/03/09/stability-vs-decline/
Comment linking /2016/03/09/stability-vs-decline/
on “The Sad State of the Backbone Ecosystem”Submitted Learning Vim in 2014 as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThis is a nice start towards something that might be useful. A few thoughts about stating that "101 will be maintained to minimize overlap with vanilla JS." though: 1. Lo-Dash and Underscore overlap with ES5 for a few reasons. First, it allows them to support environments where ES5 functions aren't available. Those are becoming less common but still exist. But the other big reason they overlap is that Underscore and…
Comment linking /2014/11/12/underscore-vs-lodash/
on “101 – A JavaScript utility library”Submitted The Most Interesting Atom Packages I've Found So Far as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThanks for the book I'll take a look on it, it seems interesting. For vimtutor it's introduced in the first part http://benmccormick.org/2014/06/30/learning-vim-in-2014-the-... The most disturbing thing when learning vim is the fact that shortcuts actually "means" something rather than being near your fingers. Like the old flashioned way to use shortcuts in RTS games vs grid modes.
Comment linking /2014/06/30/learning-vim-in-2014-the-basics/
on “Vim as Language”Submitted Is Safari Being Left Behind? as a story · 11 points
HN discussionAtom's 3rd party linter package is nicer than SublimeLinter (allows auto fixing, persistently showing errors throughout file, a few other niceties). Atom exposes nicer UIs for configuring things. There's more quality depth to Atom's 3rd party libs in my experience. I wrote this a while ago, it gives some idea what is possible with Atom: https://benmccormick.org/2016/01/11/the-most-interesting-ato...
Comment linking /2016/01/11/the-most-interesting-atom-packages-ive-found-so-far/
on “Sublime Text build 3133 now available”Submitted Copy And Paste The Vim Way as a story · 9 points
HN discussionIf you find yourself annoyed by some aspects of Underscore, you might want to check out Lodash[1]. Lodash's API is a superset of Underscore, though you can create custom builds with only the parts you need. In general, Lodash performs better and has fewer bugs than Underscore. Unlike Underscore, Lodash has 100% test coverage. Also, Lodash has some handy things like _.cloneDeep(), and semantic versioning. That means…
Comment linking /2014/11/12/underscore-vs-lodash/
on ““Discuss latest changes to master before releasing””Submitted Underscore vs. lodash as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYour articles are entitled "Learning Vim" so one could expect a little bit more depth and actual "teaching". And not promoting crap like Janus… installing that shit is the opposite of learning. It's like paying someone to do your homework for you. http://benmccormick.org/2014/07/07/learning-vim-in-2014-work... was ridiculous. In "Buffer Management", you don't talk about :find or command-line completion or the wildme…
Comment linking /2014/07/07/learning-vim-in-2014-working-with-files/
on “Getting More From Vim”Submitted The Case for Marionette.js as a story · 7 points
HN discussion"Vim as a Language"[0] is a similar article I benefited greatly from back in the day. One additional tip once you start using things like d8k: Try "set relativenumber" in your vimrc. It makes all except the current line display offsets rather than absolute line numbers. Initially, this seems silly, but you quickly realize that if you're at line 1668 and need to delete up to line 1619, it's much more helpful to see l…
Comment linking /2014/07/02/062700.html
on “Moving Fast with the Core Vim Motions”Submitted Simple Burnout Triage as a story · 6 points
HN discussionNot all "first-party" but Vim has a very very rich set of search and file management features: http://benmccormick.org/2014/11/10/vim-workflows-file-switch...
Comment linking /2014/11/10/vim-workflows-file-switching-strategies/
on “Poll: What is your primary editor?”Submitted MobX: First Impressions as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Simple Publish-Subscribe with jQuery as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Object Oriented Javascript as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
