Top all-time · #5290
Franklin Chen
Personal blog · franklinchen.com/blog · on HN as FranklinChenprogramming
Franklin Chen's personal blog at franklinchen.com covers programming. Since 2011, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 15 times, most often “Revisiting Knuth and McIlroy's word count programs (2011)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Franklin Chen's blog mainly for its 2011 post revisiting Knuth and McIlroy's word-count programs, cited as a comparison of literate programming with Unix shell pipelines. Other comments cite it on software architecture.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Franklin Chen's personal website - programmer, chess player, musician, and lifelong learner
Most-linked posts?
- Revisiting Knuth and McIlroy's word count programs (2011)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-12-01
- Revisiting Knuth and McIlroy's word count programs (2011)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-12-09
What Hacker News says?
An excellent point. To corroborate it, there was a challenge issued by Jon Bentley to Don Knuth to write a program that Doug McIlroy would then critique. The program was to parse a file and count the frequencies of words, outputting a list of the frequencies sorted highest to lowest. Knuth wrote -everything- from first principles, custom file reading, parsing, the whole nine yards. At the end he had a 10 page WEB li…
Comment linking /blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and-mcilroys-word-count-programs/
on “Stop Learning Frameworks”Submitted Justice Clarence Thomas uncovered a seven-year-old bug in my program (2013) as a story · 151 points
HN discussionAgreed, but now I think of it there is a level beyond the copying/stealing of code: "The best code is the code you didn't write". Of course, it is even better to beat a complex program with a small amount of shell-fu.[1] [1]: http://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and...
Comment linking /blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and-mcilroys-word-count-programs/
on “The best programmers are the quickest to Google”Submitted Revisiting Knuth and McIlroy's word count programs (2011) as a story · 62 points
HN discussionYes, I use Alan Kay's pyramid image[1] in my talks about software architecture[2][3][4]. But then I compare it to the Cologne Cathedral, which encloses a vastly larger space with vastly more light using 1/50th the material, yet it's the same kind of material: cut stones piled on top of each other. So there is hope, I think, and that hope, I think, is improving our understanding and practice of software architecture[…
Comment linking /blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and-mcilroys-word-count-programs/
on “Ask HN: Have you ever thought of leaving programming for something else?”Submitted Revisiting Knuth and McIlroy's word count programs (2011) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat reminds me of https://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-an... Basically, Knuth was writing a beautiful but excessively low level program. His challenger wrote a dozen lines of shell-script.
Comment linking /blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and-mcilroys-word-count-programs/
on “Taildrop was kind of easy”Submitted Revisiting Knuth and McIlroy’s word count programs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's the paper: https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/don-knuth/pearls-... (ACM ref, too: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=315654 ) Also, I found a blog post which links to a C version of the exercise in the spirit of Knuth's approach, and a Haskell version in the spirit of McIlroy's: https://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-an...
Comment linking /blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and-mcilroys-word-count-programs/
on “Programs to Read”Submitted Pinterest confused me as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI still believe that people love or hate CoffeeScript mainly because of the differences in syntax: http://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/11/06/the-real-reason-for-...
Comment linking /blog/2011/11/06/the-real-reason-for-the-coffeescript-slash-javascript-flame-war/
on “CoffeeScript is not a language worth learning”Submitted Revisiting Knuth and McIlroy's word count programs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFor more on Knuth, see https://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-an... and also a C version in http://www.cs.upc.edu/~eipec/pdf/p583-van_wyk.pdf I think the main thing that stands out to me here is just how long ago it was; Knuth was writing just past the assembler era. None of the modern infrastructure was available, such as languages with builtin dictionaries like Perl and Python. However, software…
Comment linking /blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and-mcilroys-word-count-programs/
on “The hard part in becoming a command line wizard”I had commented on Chen's post, here: http://franklinchen.com/blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and... and linked to a blog post of mine, in which I too had written two solutions (one in Python and one in shell) to the original problem posed to Knuth by Bentley. Fun. Here are my solutions: https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/07/the-bentley-knuth-problem... A roughly similar problem is posed and solved in the Kernighan an…
Comment linking /blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and-mcilroys-word-count-programs/
on “Revisiting Knuth and McIlroy's word count programs (2011)”Concerning stephen's item (2). The stricter set of rules was laid out by Richard C. Waters in Optimization of Series Expressions: Part I: User's Manual for the Series Macro Package, page 46 (document page 48). See reference Waters(1989a). The paper's language is a bit different than contemporary (2023) language. `map()` is called `map-fn`. `reduce()` a.k.a. `fold` seems to be `collect-fn`, although `collecting-fn` a…
Comment linking /blog/2011/12/08/revisiting-knuth-and-mcilroys-word-count-programs/
on “Bun v0.8.0”
