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Go away, the cloud is full
Personal blog · sevangelatos.comprogramming
Go away, the cloud is full is a personal blog at sevangelatos.com about programming. Since 2019, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “John Carmack on static code analysis (2018)”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Hosts John Carmack's essays, mainly on functional programming and static analysis, which HN commenters link to and cite. Commenters single out his functional programming essay as a strong piece.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
ps aux | more
Most-linked posts?
- John Carmack on static code analysis (2018)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-12-22
- John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-02-17
- John Carmack on Parallel Implementations (2018)3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-08-01
- /john-carmack-on/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-17
- John Carmack on Parallel Implementations2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-08-01
What Hacker News says?
A similar, more concrete approach is parallel implementations, as written about by John Carmack[0]. I suppose the main difference is that parallel implementation has you very explicitly and intentionally leave the "old stuff" around until you're ready to flip the switch. I've used this approach in large-scale refactorings very successfully. One of the benefits is that you get to compare the new vs old implementation…
Comment linking /john-carmack-on-parallel-implementations/
on “Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases”Submitted John Carmack on Parallel Implementations (2018) as a story · 271 points
HN discussionAgreed, and Carmack as always was ahead of the curve here. In case anyone here hasn’t seen it, here’s his famous essay, Functional Programming in C++: http://sevangelatos.com/john-carmack-on/ He addresses your point: > I do believe that there is real value in pursuing functional programming, but it would be irresponsible to exhort everyone to abandon their C++ compilers and start coding in Lisp, Haskell, or, to be b…
Comment linking /john-carmack-on/
on “John Carmack on mutable variables”Submitted John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI suspect fewer than you think. At least in FAANG code. Google chrome has had a fair few CVEs over the years despite having a lot of the worlds best security researchers working full time looking for security vulnerabilities. I think someone has tried reading the compiler warnings. There’s an old story about John carmack running a new static analysis tool on the quake3 source code. The code worked well. The tool app…
Comment linking /john-carmack-on-static-code-analysis/
on “Microsoft seeks Rust developers to rewrite core C# code”Submitted John Carmack on static code analysis (2018) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionNo, my argument is that TS makes writing code easier and that easier does not equal to quality [0]. I have been writing code for more than 20 years. Personally, TS doesn't impress me. This is not meant as a criticism. Personally, I have found functional programming to be revelatory. I am shocked that is as been around as long as it has and that our schools don't teach it (or just mention it) and the majority of peop…
Comment linking /john-carmack-on/
on “Etsy’s Journey to TypeScript”Submitted A Windows mutex is not a mutex as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI read the book (which is only 200 pages, a lot skimmable, and free online even (edit: used to be, now parts on the manning site are garbled)) and liked it. Presented it to some coworkers once, and described how I used the method pretty successfully for a few actual work items. Because the work environment used Perforce, not everything was done as micro commits, but still. One task was small, it was to delete a secr…
Comment linking /john-carmack-on-parallel-implementations/
on “A Plea for More Mikado”Submitted John Carmack on Parallel Implementations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionCarmack also used to have some really insightful articles on AltDevBlog. I recently read his one on functional programming and thought it was very well thought out. This site had nice re-uploads for the some of the articles. You can maybe google around and find more [0] http://sevangelatos.com/tag/john-carmack/
Comment linking /tag/john-carmack/
on “Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)”Submitted John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAs a mobile dev for games/apps I like to have as many versions of devices as possible, newest one if possible. However, the older phones/tablets/devices are best to start and do most of the development on, somewhat like making sure a game runs on an older PC or laptop. If you tune your app to the lower end (older) devices, scaling up is easier than scaling down. If all you have is the latest devices it will lead to…
Comment linking /john-carmack-on-parallel-implementations/
on “The iPhone is no longer Apple’s most important product”Submitted John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis is a tour de force, and it accomplishes the goal of enabling FP using the Go syntax and toolchain. But code written using this library is no longer Go: most Go programmers can't grok it, and it's awkward to call normal Go libraries because there's no way to know if that function you're calling is pure. If your goal is to "make it easy and fun to write maintainable and testable code in golang" by making pure fun…
Comment linking /john-carmack-on/
on “Functional Programming Library for Golang by IBM”Submitted John Carmack on Static code analysis (2018) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt is a static analyzer built into Microsoft Visual Studio: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/analyz... The only reason I know about it is that John Carmack rated it highly: http://www.sevangelatos.com/john-carmack-on-static-code-anal...
Comment linking /john-carmack-on-static-code-analysis/
on “Checked C”Submitted John Carmack on Parallel Implementations as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWas it PC-Lint? That was probably a bad choice. John Carmack did not rate it very highly: http://www.sevangelatos.com/john-carmack-on-static-code-anal...
Comment linking /john-carmack-on-static-code-analysis/
on “Checked C”One of the best post on FP I read was John Carmack's realisation that FP had a strong place in any code base [0]. It's a really valuable lesson to keep most function as pure and stateless, but transformation of the existing state. Build your entire codebase around this idea and frankly, abstraction will take care of itself. [0] http://www.sevangelatos.com/john-carmack-on/
Comment linking /john-carmack-on/
on “Death by design patterns, or On the cognitive load of abstractions in the code”> The old system was _riddled_ with unit tests that could easily be replicated in any language. All of the bugs and/or minor issues over the last 30 years had been documented and had unit tests covering them. This was what saved the rewrite. Our rewrite could rely a lot on TDD based on those tests, which made it possible for us to trap problems early on. This is the crux of it. The hard part of a rewrite or major re…
Comment linking /john-carmack-on-parallel-implementations/
on “Rewrite, refactor, or reinvent? Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories (2019)”
