Top all-time · #9040
Dick Gabriel
Personal blog · dreamsongs.netprogrammingwriting
Dick Gabriel writes Dreamsongs, a personal blog at dreamsongs.net about programming and writing. Since 2008, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Patterns of Software (1996) [pdf]”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Dick Gabriel's personal site, cited for essays and the free PDF of Patterns of Software. HN readers link it for his writing on software habitability, inheritance, and Lisp and AI company history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Patterns of Software (1996) [pdf]7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2012-11-10
What Hacker News says?
Patterns of Software is available as a free PDF directly from Gabriel's website: http://dreamsongs.net/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
Comment linking /Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
on “The Nature of Lisp”Submitted Patterns of Software (1996) [pdf] as a story · 8 points
HN discussionIn my opinion the best arguments against inheritance were written by Richard Gabriel in his book Patterns of Software: http://dreamsongs.net/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
Comment linking /Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
on “Why composition is often better than inheritance”Submitted Dick Gabriel: Designed as Designer, as a story · 2 points
HN discussionJWZ reposted it off Dreamsongs.net, Richard Gabriel's personal site. I think these may be what you want: http://dreamsongs.net/Essays.html
Comment linking /Essays.html
on “History of T”There's lots more to be said about the late 80s collapse of AI (ES) applications and expectations On that subject, Richard Gabriel [1] writes about his experiences as a founder of Lucid, which produced Common Lisp for regular Unix workstations, in the "Into the Ground: Lisp" chapter of his book, "Patterns of Software", which is available as a free PDF from his web site [2]. (Lucid's pivot to developing a C++ environ…
Comment linking /Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
on “Why Did Symbolics Fail? (2009)”Depends on your goals. Generally, if you want to work with product development, please learn the importance of good abstraction, readable code, clarity, doing the simplest thing, refactoring, and so on. Most of the time, you can get away with just hacking away until it works. But code bases developed like that tend to develop tons of incidental complexity, weird logic, unintelligible ownership issues, etc. Clever al…
Comment linking /Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
on “What should a self-taught programmer study?”Reminds me of Richard P Gabriel's essay on Habitability (PDF, Page 9, http://dreamsongs.net/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf ) "Habitability is the characteristic of source code that enables programmers, coders, bug-fixers, and people coming to the code later in its life to understand its construction and intentions and to change it comfortably and confidently. Either there is more to habitability than clarity or the two…
Comment linking /Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
on “Ruining the diversity of JavaScript community with a coding style guide”Are you claiming the world is working-as-intended? Since bad API designers so outnumber good ones, and bad APIs get used more than they should, perhaps we should just avoid the hard problems of API design by getting users to take a little of the load off? I consider 'standard body' to be a term of insult, synonymous with 'committee that designs'. They're great at bolt-on features, bad at rethinking or expiring desig…
Comment linking /Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
on “Software Libraries don't have to suck”
