Top all-time · #4255
Daniel K Lyons
Personal blog · storytotell.org · on HN as fusiongyroprogrammingdesignculture
Daniel K Lyons writes Daniel's Blog, a personal blog at storytotell.org about programming, design and culture. Since 2007, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times, most often “Relational Thinking in J”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for posts on programming language history and style, such as a functional-style quicksort in several languages and debates on code readability and Lisp S-expressions. Comments cite it without judging it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The latest on Daniel's Blog
Most-linked posts?
- /essays/good-for-whom.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-03-09
- Relational Thinking in J2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-28
- Juxtaposition in Programming Languages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-28
- Free your technical aesthetic from the 2010s2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-03-01
What Hacker News says?
I blogged recently about some problems I have with JIRA: http://www.storytotell.org/constraints-and-semantics/ In a nutshell, I argue that the problem with most ticket systems is that they do not constrain the domain enough, so they wind up having similar problems to email (sifting through a chronologically-ordered pile of text rather than structured, semantically-ordered information). Your comments make me think th…
Comment linking /constraints-and-semantics/
on “Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?”Submitted Free your technical aesthetic from the 2010s as a story · 229 points
HN discussionSeems like a popular thing to do, but probably time consuming (I probably have dozens more URLs but i'd have to search a lot of laptops, delicious, and... remember magnolia?) http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/02/a-functional-programming-inf... http://blog.fogus.me/2012/06/07/an-object-oriented-influence... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3920619 http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigms.html (the Dewey decimal system…
Comment linking /essays/juxtaposition.html
on “Programming languages influence network”Submitted Smalltalk, Haskell and Lisp as a story · 128 points
HN discussionHere's a quicksort in various languages, including OCaml, written in functional style: http://www.storytotell.org/articles/2006/11/22/the-quicksort...
Comment linking /articles/2006/11/22/the-quicksort-shootout
on “Ask Hackers: Opinions on OCaml?”Submitted Prolog's Eternal September (2017) as a story · 87 points
HN discussionOne difficulty with these discussions it that there is no standard, objective definition of readability. Without one, it’s hard to debate statements like the title of this thread, “Readability can mislead”. After thinking about this a lot, I settled on a personal definition of “ease of extracting useful information from the code”. This recognises some principles I’ve found to be important when discussing readability…
Comment linking /essays/good-for-whom.html
on “Readability can mislead”Submitted How to Average in Prolog (2017) as a story · 72 points
HN discussionThis is the response anybody who tries to make s-expressions "more readable" will get from lispers: don't bother. It didn't work in the 60's, why would it work now? Parens aren't unreadable, not like a sigil and punctuation heavy language, and on top of actually being reasonably readable, they are also extremely easy to edit with something like paredit in emacs and vim. So reasonable readability and extremely easy e…
Comment linking /essays/good-for-whom.html
on “Readable Lisp S-expressions Project”Submitted Why ORM divides us as a story · 16 points
HN discussionSubmitted Critique of DHH philosophy: "37signals' products tend to be so "opinionated" as to be anti-user" as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fibonacci in PostgreSQL as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted About the Cruft as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted APL Symbol Fetishism (2017) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Juxtaposition in Programming Languages as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Relational Thinking in J as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Missing the Point as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Free your technical aesthetic from the 2010s: A rejection of the rejection of as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Smalltalk, Haskell and Lisp as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Relational Thinking in J as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Year of Synthesizers (2020) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Literate Programming Considered Harmful as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Defines the Ruby Community? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
