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Needleful.net
Personal blog · needleful.net/blogprogramming
Needleful.net is a personal blog at needleful.net about programming. Since 2025, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3 times, most often “Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for a post walking through Arthur Whitney's terse C code, written as a learning exercise over about eight hours, with some conclusions on the coding style.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-03
What Hacker News says?
IMO this is a really good blog post, whatever you think of the coding style. Great effort by the author, really good for eight hours' work (as mentioned), and some illuminating conclusions: https://needleful.net/blog/2024/01/arthur_whitney.html#:~:te...
Comment linking /blog/2024/01/arthur_whitney.html
on “Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)”Submitted Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024) as a story · 371 points
HN discussionNot a joke, and a famous piece of J lore! There have a been at least a couple attempts I've seen posted here of blog posts breaking down the code in a beginner friendly way. One I dug up is: https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... Related: https://needleful.net/blog/2024/01/arthur_whitney.html
Comment linking /blog/2024/01/arthur_whitney.html
on “An Implementation of J (1992)”