Top all-time · #4780
Curtis Poe
Personal blog · ovid.github.io/articlesprogrammingai
Curtis Poe writes Software and business articles by Ovid, a personal blog at ovid.github.io about programming and ai. Since 2014, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times, most often “Alan Kay and Missing Messages”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Curtis Poe's posts discuss programming skills and Alan Kay's ideas on message passing and late binding, drawing on Lisp, Smalltalk and Perl.
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.
Curtis “Ovid” Poe on using AI to build software you can still maintain in three years. Articles and essays on programming, testing, and engineering.
Most-linked posts?
- Alan Kay and Missing Messages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-22
- Death by Database2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-09-19
- Alan Kay and OO Programming2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-21
- Fixing MVC in Web Applications2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-04-17
- Programming in 1987 versus Today2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-04
What Hacker News says?
This forms part of what Alan Kay calls “late binding” [see link below] and describes as part of what makes Lisp and Smalltalk great, which is something of a lost art today, mainly because most contemporary programming languages (the usual suspects in the statically-typed camp but also languages one would not expect, Python / Javascript) go out of their way to de-emphasize it. I feel that Perl was the last, massively…
Comment linking /articles/alan-kay-and-oo-programming.html
on “Skills Poor Programmers Lack”Submitted Alan Kay and OO Programming as a story · 173 points
HN discussion>This is about message passing at an abstract level, which is what Alan Kay imagined with Smalltalk. The merits of Alan Kay's message passing are fine but it is not relevant to this case of the author writing an inappropriate solution because he misunderstood a commenter's feedback. The "this" in your "_this_ is about message passing at an abstract level" comment seems to only refer to blog article #2 in isolation -…
Comment linking /articles/alan-kay-and-missing-messages-a-follow-up.html
on “Alan Kay and Missing Messages”Submitted Programming in 1987 versus Today as a story · 148 points
HN discussionSubmitted Alan Kay and Missing Messages as a story · 115 points
HN discussionSubmitted Death by Database as a story · 97 points
HN discussionSubmitted Database Design Standards as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fixing MVC in Web Applications as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Show HN: 3D rotating star map in JavaScript as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted A different approach to beating Facebook as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Is Object-Oriented Programming Bad? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Programming in 1987 versus Today as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Software Projects as Used Cars as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fixing MVC in Web Applications as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Simple Way to Fix Legacy Code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Death by Database: a short story of how a bad schema can hurt you company as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted WildAgile as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Future of Perl as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Common Problems in Object-Oriented Code as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Easy Git Workflow (2020) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Zen of Test Suites as a story · 1 points
HN discussion