Top all-time · #15622
Jeroen De Dauw
Personal blog · entropywins.wtf/blogprogrammingcareer
Jeroen De Dauw's personal blog at entropywins.wtf covers programming and career. Since 2018, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 6 times, most often “Simple is not easy”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Jeroen De Dauw's post 'Simple is not easy' as a source for the distinction between simple and easy, mainly in threads criticising C's complexity.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Jeroen De Dauw is founder and CEO of Professional Wiki and builds NeoWiki. Original developer of Wikibase, the software behind Wikidata.
Most-linked posts?
- Simple is not easy3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-10-31
What Hacker News says?
> "Who Says C is Simple?" People who don't know what "simple" means and confuse it with "easy". https://www.entropywins.wtf/blog/2017/01/02/simple-is-not-ea... https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ "Easy" things almost always lead to astonishing complexity. Also it's easy to see just how complex C is: Have a look at a formal description of it! (And compare to a truly simple language like e.g. LISP).…
Comment linking /blog/2017/01/02/simple-is-not-easy/
on “Mildly interesting quirks of C”Submitted Advice for Junior Developers as a story · 2 points
HN discussion[Simple is not easy][1]. [1]: https://www.entropywins.wtf/blog/2017/01/02/simple-is-not-ea...
Comment linking /blog/2017/01/02/simple-is-not-easy/
on “Being fat is a trap”Submitted The fallacy of DRY as a story · 2 points
HN discussionC is not simple. Not even close. It's the single language still in use with at least one or two orders of magnitude more quirks than features . C is full of bobby traps. And nobody survived. Ever. It's impossible to build reliable software in C. Even people tried for 50 years. People died in RL not only once because of issues with the C language. I think no other language carries a real world death toll around. C ma…
Comment linking /blog/2017/01/02/simple-is-not-easy/
on “Long story short: I wrote a Ruby extension in Zig”Submitted Simple is not easy as a story · 1 points
HN discussion