Top all-time · #2957
Jon Purdy
Personal blog · evincarofautumn.blogspot.com · on HN as evincarofautumnprogrammingphilosophywriting
Jon Purdy writes The Big Mud Puddle, a personal blog at evincarofautumn.blogspot.com about programming, philosophy and writing. Since 2011, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 47 times, most often “Why Concatenative Programming Matters”. The last post was in 2012, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Jon Purdy's blog, best known for the essay "Why Concatenative Programming Matters", which explains concatenative and stack-based languages. Commenters repeatedly link it as the go-to explainer for that programming style.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Jon Purdy writes blarticles on computing, language, and design.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Concatenative Programming Matters13 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2012-02-12
- Why Concatenative Programming Matters (2012)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-11-29
- Programming Languages Suck at UX2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-11-04
- How to Be Productive2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-09-28
- Solving the Halting Problem2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-10-06
What Hacker News says?
The best reference I can show for the general programming model was a blog post which is not in G, but was called "Why Concatenative Programming Matters": http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-concatenativ... which shows you how graphical diagrams can make sense out of concatenative programs. If you really want an example, then I will give you this with some caution: http://team358.org/files/programming/Co…
Comment linking /2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html
on “Light Table - a new IDE concept”Submitted Why Concatenative Programming Matters as a story · 219 points
HN discussionI like Alan Watts for meditation.[1] I have some mala beads as he suggests, and find they help me a lot. Its easier to time sessions, just count the beads with your fingers and when you reach the end of the mala, you can stop. They also help one to breath/count without consciously focusing on breathing/counting, or even worse, getting stuck in your head trying to focus on not focusing. Regarding sleep, read somethin…
Comment linking /2011/09/how-to-be-productive.html
on “The myth of the eight-hour sleep”Submitted Tricky Programming Concepts Aren’t as a story · 185 points
HN discussionIt’s only the newer “concatenative” languages that have explored this forms correspondence. See this essay by Jon Purdy (author of Kitten) on “why concatenative languages matter”: http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-concatenativ...
Comment linking /2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html?m=1
on “Collapse OS – Why Forth?”Submitted Computers Aren’t Fast Anymore (2013) as a story · 97 points
HN discussionWould be good to add some concatenative languages to that list :) http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-concatenativ...
Comment linking /2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html
on “Hyperpolyglot”Submitted Why Concatenative Programming Matters (2012) as a story · 93 points
HN discussionI came across this paper recently while looking at Kitten (it was actually mentioned in HN before): http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-concatenativ... I think really explains the idea. I always liked combinatory logic more than lambda calculus, although it didn't click to me that the concatenative languages are essentially the formalism for it (as opposed to ML-style syntax). Although I would say functi…
Comment linking /2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html
on “Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style? (1978)”Submitted Why concatenative programming matters (2012) as a story · 76 points
HN discussionThere exist other languages in the category, e.g. https://kittenlang.org/ , http://www.factorcode.org/ , https://github.com/cdiggins/cat-language , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_(programming_language) . I assume the parent poster referred to improving those (or at least explaining which deficiencies of those myrth is addressing). (In case you didn't already, you can read about this family of languages in http:…
Comment linking /2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html
on “Mirth – a type-safe concatenative purely functional programming language”Submitted Why concatenative programming matters (2012) as a story · 76 points
HN discussionThe author’s blog is also good, though it’s been several years since the last post: http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com
Comment linking /
on “The Kitten Programming Language”Submitted Programming Languages Suck at UX as a story · 73 points
HN discussionBest advocacy I know of: http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-concatenativ... Presented by way of being an interesting link, and the educational nature of reading the best arguments in favor of something. I haven't done anything in concatenative programming in about 20 years, since I left math class and didn't need my HP 48G anymore.
Comment linking /2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html
on “Stack-Oriented Programming”Submitted Why Concatenative Programming Matters (2012) as a story · 63 points
HN discussionNo, and there's nothing wrong with this. Actually - I didn't read the article very carefully, so I may be completely wrong here - it looks like the OP uses a bit incorrect term. To me it looks like the word he wants is "applicative", and the opposition to it would be "concatenative" (see: http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-concatenativ... ). "Imperative" is usually contrasted with "declarative" (and not…
Comment linking /2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html
on “Clojure is Imperative”Submitted Yep, Programming Is Borked as a story · 48 points
HN discussionAh, okay. So by less syntax you mean fewer syntactic forms (parentheses, curly braces, do notation, etc.) and keywords (class, public, etc.) in the language. I think in general, languages with fewer syntactic forms also have fewer but more powerful abstraction features. Lisps are pretty high up by this measure. They basically only have one abstraction feature: lambda expressions. Other languages have powerful abstra…
Comment linking /2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html
on “Syntax Matters...?”Submitted The Web Is Wrong as a story · 19 points
HN discussionCould you support your claim that running times are irrelevant? I understand you want to keep your blog post (or "blarticle") short. But maybe you could elaborate here? I am genuinely interested in your argument. I think there are other caveat of specifying only the results. You posted earlier on the halting problem http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2011/10/solving-halting-... That post also contains a statement w…
Comment linking /2011/10/solving-halting-problem.html
on “Yep, Programming Is Borked”Submitted Regexes Parse XML Just Fine, Actually as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThere is a new phrasal verb “be a thing” which lets us conveniently talk about such constructions. That is, “now and then” is a thing—an idiom, with a specific meaning outside the wording—but “then and now” is not a thing. You will note that all of the semantic constraints they propose place the item with a “positive” aspect first—I wrote a blog post about this[1]. There is also a related notion of “stormy petrel”[2…
Comment linking /2014/08/adjective-valence-and-linguistic.html
on “Ordering of conjoined elements in English (1975) [pdf]”Submitted Why Concatenative Programming Matters as a story · 6 points
HN discussionA more explanatory article mentioned in the post: https://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-concatenati...
Comment linking /2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html
on “om”Submitted Steve Jobs Was a Jerk as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSome people really like the idea of concatenative languages. I think this is probably reasonably viewed as "research into making those actually usable", in addition to a fun hobby project. Here's a blog post that tries to motivate them: https://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-concatenati... Here's another interesting recent attempt: https://www.dawn-lang.org/posts/introducing-dawn-(part-1)/
Comment linking /2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html
on “Uiua: A minimal stack-based, array-based language”Submitted Frighteningly Ambitious Programming Language Ideas as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Pronounce Hexadecimal Numbers as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Concatenative Programming Matters (2012) as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
