Top all-time · #3433
Cocoaphony
Personal blog · robnapier.netprogramming
Cocoaphony is a personal blog at robnapier.net about programming. Since 2014, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “Go Is a Shop-Built Jig”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-05-15, 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 Rob Napier's Cocoaphony blog for posts on Swift (including whether it is functional and type erasure in protocols), Go's syntax and lack of generics, and the App Store sustainability problem.
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.
I’m going to talk about testing over the next few posts. If you’ve talked to me at any length over the last several years, you know I’ve been …
Most-linked posts?
- Go Is a Shop-Built Jig4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-09-17
- Swift is not functional3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-06-15
- Throw Money at It3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-06-23
What Hacker News says?
> Swift is widely marketed as a functional language If that's true, those sources reporting that are wrong. Apple itself refers to it instead as a "protocol-oriented language" when it's not just saying "object-oriented". Swift is definitely not a functional language in the way that it usually means, and Apple knows this, and any legit survey of languages wouldn't clump it together with much more functional languages…
Comment linking /swift-is-not-functional
on “Fun with Swift”Submitted I Don't Know Swift as a story · 235 points
HN discussionAny language seems inconsistent and has hard to remember syntax for people who are new to it. Unlike most of other languages, you can learn Go in a weekend and get beyond the newbie problems. There was a great article lately about Go's syntax - http://robnapier.net/go-is-a-shop-built-jig The crux of the matter is that there are inelegant parts to the language because they are usefully inelegant, and when you're actu…
Comment linking /go-is-a-shop-built-jig
on “Official Go support”Submitted Go Is a Shop-Built Jig as a story · 145 points
HN discussionIt's not just about Taylor Swift having way more pull than any developer, she was also presenting Apple with a problem simple enough that it could literally be solved by throwing money at it. As Rob Napier pointed out in a great blog post [1]: The app store sustainability problem is definitely not the sort of problem you can just throw money at, and thus can't be responded to by Apple with the same way. Even in this…
Comment linking /throw-money
on “Apple's Indies”Submitted Go Is a Shop-built Jig (2014) as a story · 103 points
HN discussionIt's not a functional language: http://robnapier.net/swift-is-not-functional Please inform me what Swift's type system has over, say, Java as I don't know of anything and neither does a cursory Google. The lack of an HTTP server is only an example. Let's see you parse JSON, or stream a Unix socket, or any of countless basic things that even Node includes in its standard lib. Swift doesn't really have much of anythin…
Comment linking /swift-is-not-functional
on “Swift: Things I really wanted that won’t make it”Submitted I, for One, Welcome Our New Haskell Overlords as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI've had the same experience - very little need for generics in Go on a regular basis. I really appreciated the following snippet from http://robnapier.net/go-is-a-shop-built-jig : "Probably the biggest complaint people have with Go is the lack of generics. And I did run into that in just the first couple of weeks of work on my project, and I wound up with a bunch of duplicated code to work around it. And then, when…
Comment linking /go-is-a-shop-built-jig
on “Avoiding Complexity with Go”Submitted Llama Calculus as a story · 5 points
HN discussionTwo things which might be useful to him: Rob napier's article on type erasure: http://robnapier.net/erasure Alexis Gallagher's talk on PATs and generic constraints: https://youtu.be/XWoNjiSPqI8
Comment linking /erasure
on “Limitations of protocols in Swift”Submitted Swift Is Not Functional, It's Generic as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Swift is not functional as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Throw Money at It as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Swift Is Not Functional as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Littlest Type as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Refactoring Slow and Steady as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Rethrows? Error propagation in Swift as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Evolving abstractions with Swift as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Maps Wait, They Don't Love You Like I Love You – Cocoaphony as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted But Should I Swift? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Swift Is Not Functional as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Mockery of Types as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted ASCII as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Throw Money at It as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Brute Forcing Passwords as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
