Top all-time · #2957
David Herman
Personal blog · calculist.org/blogprogrammingweb
David Herman writes The Little Calculist, a personal blog at calculist.org about programming and web. Since 2011, 25 different Hacker News readers have linked it 28 times, most often “Homoiconicity isn’t the point (2012)”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Dave Herman's personal blog.
Most-linked posts?
- Homoiconicity isn’t the point (2012)12 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2012-04-17
- Neon: Node plus Rust4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-12-24
- Why Coroutines Won't Work on the Web3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-12-14
- On “On Asm.js”2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-11-27
What Hacker News says?
> Why even bother with such half-baked solutions? In almost every case it's utterly transparent that these solutions exist for the benefit of the compiler and runtime author, usually because of intentional or unintentional technical debt--a direct or indirect dependency on the C or kernel stack. There is a significant faction of language designers that disagree, and think that keeping coroutines shallow is important…
Comment linking /blog/2011/12/14/why-coroutines-wont-work-on-the-web/
on “Zero-cost futures in Rust”Submitted Neon: Node plus Rust as a story · 338 points
HN discussionDave Herman has been a high signal-to-noise contributor to Lambda the Ultimate over the years; if you want to get an idea as to where he is coming from, looking at his contributions there [1], his slightly active blog [2], and on his now pretty much inactive joint blog [3] are good places to start. [1]: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/user/825/track?sort=desc&orde... [2]: http://calculist.org/ [3]: https://www.thefee…
Comment linking /
on “Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust”Submitted On “On Asm.js” as a story · 98 points
HN discussionHomoiconicity is a neat thing when you just get started, although there's some interesting discussion around that subject here - http://calculist.org/blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-...
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-point/
on “Learn C and build your own Lisp”Submitted Homoiconicity isn’t the point (2012) as a story · 80 points
HN discussionWhile this is true in some sense, there are also advantages. A ruby gem written in Rust via C FFI was one of the earliest production uses of Rust; the Skylight people still thought (and think) that it was very, very worth it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BdJeSC4FFI is a further exploration of this idea and how it works. Yes, you do need that small layer, but future libraries will make it even easier. There's the…
Comment linking /blog/2015/12/23/neon-node-rust/
on “Glibc getaddrinfo stack-based buffer overflow”Submitted Homoiconicity isn’t the point (2012) as a story · 79 points
HN discussionWith specific C++ features there is still a lot of work to do, however the C FFI is solid and simple to use if that is enough for you (see e.g. https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ffi.html ). Interfacing Rust and python, ruby, node can be quite simple in fact (micro demo for node: http://calculist.org/blog/2015/12/23/neon-node-rust/ )
Comment linking /blog/2015/12/23/neon-node-rust/
on “Two Weeks of Rust”Submitted Homoiconicity isn’t the point (2012) as a story · 75 points
HN discussionMacro systems are becoming increasingly popular (e.g. Rust and Sweet.js), but arguably neither of those languages is homoiconic in the Lisp sense (though see also Dave Herman's "Homoiconicity isn't the point" http://calculist.org/blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-... ).
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-point/
on “Steve Yegge Grades His Own Predictions”Submitted Homoiconicity isn't the point as a story · 9 points
HN discussionDelimited continuations are not gonna happen. See http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:shallow_cont... , http://calculist.blogspot.com/2010/04/single-frame-continuat... , and http://calculist.org/blog/2011/12/14/why-coroutines-wont-wor... .
Comment linking /blog/2011/12/14/why-coroutines-wont-work-on-the-web/
on “JavaScript Needs Blocks”Submitted Toolchains as Code as a story · 8 points
HN discussionBut most compilers have a parser. Scheme doesn't need one ;) http://calculist.org/blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-...
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-point/
on “Writing Your Own Programming Language”Submitted I'm Running for W3C TAG & I'd Like Your Support (David Herman) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionS-expressions aren't actually necessary for macros to work. You just have to be able to separate "READ" from "EXPAND" (to use Lisp-ish terminology). I believe, but am not sure, that this is possible for Go. (Of course, whether this is a good idea is another thing entirely. I probably wouldn't have included macros if I had been put in charge of Go 1.0, given Go's goals of simplicity.) More on this from my former coll…
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-point/
on “Show HN: Gojay – Performant JSON encoder/decoder for Golang”Submitted Why Coroutines Won't Work on the Web as a story · 6 points
HN discussionYes: http://calculist.org/blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-...
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-point/
on “Writing Complex Macros in Rust: Reverse Polish Notation”Submitted The little-endian web? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionprevious -> http://calculist.org/blog/2015/12/23/neon-node-rust/
Comment linking /blog/2015/12/23/neon-node-rust/
on “A safe Rust abstraction layer for native Node.js modules”Submitted Native JavaScript classes in Neon as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHomoiconicity is either a trivial property (we can define an AST!) or a not-relevant-to-macros one (probably best expressed as "we have quote", which is basically true of JS). This post by Dave Herman nicely expresses the problems with homoiconicity as a concept: http://calculist.org/blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-...
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-point/
on “Homoiconic Faq”Submitted Homoiconicity isn't the point [2012] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis feels almost like a parody to http://calculist.org/blog/2013/11/27/on-on-asm-js/
Comment linking /blog/2013/11/27/on-on-asm-js/
on “Why I’m not on the Julia bandwagon (yet) (2012)”Submitted Homoiconicity isn't the point as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I used to like Lisp's homoiconicity. These days, I'm not even sure the concept makes any sense? What is it even supposed to mean? You are not alone: http://calculist.org/blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-...
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/17/homoiconicity-isnt-the-point/
on “Designing a Language Without a Parser”Submitted Homoiconicity isn’t the point as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
