Top all-time · #2767
Kris Jenkins
Personal blog · blog.jenkster.comprogrammingweb
Kris Jenkins's personal blog at blog.jenkster.com covers programming and web. Since 2013, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times, most often “How Elm Slays a UI Antipattern”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kris Jenkins's posts on functional programming and Elm, mostly as explanations of why FP matters, a fix for UI loading-state antipatterns, and exhaustive pattern matching.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The personal blog of Kris Jenkins, geek.
Most-linked posts?
- How Elm Slays a UI Antipattern9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2016-06-08
- What is functional programming?7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-12-30
- Microservices – Check Size Before Ordering3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-07-09
- A Brief and Partial Review of Haskell in the Browser3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-02-03
- One can dream: Google docs + Vim2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-20
- Which Programming Languages Are Functional?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-30
- Trick: type bombs in elm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-08
What Hacker News says?
I'm not talking about superficial syntax like map/filter for collections. The notion of keeping the majority of your code side-effect-free with immutability, built-in concurrency and message-passing as idiomatic parts of the language/ecosystem is to this day uncommon and partially impossible in Python/Ruby. http://blog.jenkster.com/2015/12/what-is-functional-programm...
Comment linking /2015/12/what-is-functional-programming.html
on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”Submitted Which Programming Languages Are Functional? as a story · 94 points
HN discussionTime to plug Kris' blog post about Haskell in the browser: http://blog.jenkster.com/2015/02/a-brief-and-partial-review-... TLDR: he thinks elm's the most practical approach right now.
Comment linking /2015/02/a-brief-and-partial-review-of-haskell-in-the-browser.html
on “Why OCaml, why now? (2014)”Submitted What is functional programming? as a story · 11 points
HN discussionTo keep building on this, I think the word "parsing" is just the tip of the iceberg. Parsing is one way to port data across a type boundary, where the source and dest types are optimized for different use cases (e.g. serialization vs type-safe representation). Since the semantic Venn diagrams of any two types might have areas of non-overlap, parse-don't-validate means establishing clear boundaries in your program wh…
Comment linking /2016/06/how-elm-slays-a-ui-antipattern.html
on “Parsix: Parse Don't Validate”Submitted Functional Mumbo Jumbo – ADTs as a story · 7 points
HN discussionElm is so amazing. It isn't as amazing when you just try out it's tutorial, but if you try to build an actual application in it, especially if you are a single programmer working on a project. In my experience whenever I worked on a JS project on my own, there was an upper limit to how far I could keep writing the code on my own. After that, I had to spend time in doing other things (like writing Integration tests,…
Comment linking /2016/06/how-elm-slays-a-ui-antipattern.html
on “Glimmer.js: What’s the Deal with TypeScript?”Submitted How Elm Slays a UI Antipattern as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYou never leave the loading spinner state, but you don't throw. This actually inspired the Remote Data package which encourages you to break with the UI antipattern[0] where "result not yet loaded" is conflated with "we know there is nothing there." This pattern of handling those states has made its way into the official guide too, in case you want to start without using anything outside of the core library (a commo…
Comment linking /2016/06/how-elm-slays-a-ui-antipattern.html
on “Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI”Submitted How Elm Slays a UI Antipattern as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSounds like the codebase would benefit from http://blog.jenkster.com/2016/06/how-elm-slays-a-ui-antipatt... which is what we use all over the place in our production Elm app and I can't praise it enough.
Comment linking /2016/06/how-elm-slays-a-ui-antipattern.html
on “Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI”Submitted What Is Functional Programming? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI don't know whether you recognize this as wrong, or are surprised at the thought of such a thing (which doesn't actually exist like that). In any case, i've suggested a correction here: http://blog.jenkster.com/2015/12/which-programming-languages...
Comment linking /2015/12/which-programming-languages-are-functional.html
on “Which Programming Languages Are Functional?”Submitted A Brief and Partial Review of Haskell in the Browser as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis is exactly the kind of issue that go away with elm. http://blog.jenkster.com/2016/06/how-elm-slays-a-ui-antipatt...
Comment linking /2016/06/how-elm-slays-a-ui-antipattern.html
on “A better way to represent loading state in ReactJS/Redux apps”Submitted Microservices – Check Size Before Ordering as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think this article is a pretty good introduction to when exhaustive pattern matching is desirable: http://blog.jenkster.com/2016/06/how-elm-slays-a-ui-antipatt...
Comment linking /2016/06/how-elm-slays-a-ui-antipattern.html
on “If statements considered harmful”Submitted A brief and partial review of Haskell in the browser as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIn part 2 he writes about why it's not the essence of functional programming: http://blog.jenkster.com/2015/12/which-programming-languages...
Comment linking /2015/12/which-programming-languages-are-functional.html
on “What is functional programming?”Submitted Delegated Coding Has a Bright Future as a story · 2 points
HN discussionKris Jenkins wrote this page about functional programming, which is the best quick explanation of why functional programming languages matter: http://blog.jenkster.com/2015/12/what-is-functional-programm... And then you mix that with Larry Wall's famous quote: "Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy." So you mix these two references together and you get the idea…
Comment linking /2015/12/what-is-functional-programming.html
on “The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Python, Scheme) Berkeley”Submitted Elm Slays a UI Antipattern as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted MicroServices – Check Size Before Ordering as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Is Functional Programming? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Type Bombs in Elm as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Trick: type bombs in elm as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Is Functional Programming? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Is Functional Programming? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Dear Starbucks, I Like Clojure as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing a Spotify Client in 16 Minutes as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
