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Mike's corner of the web
Personal blog · mike.zwobble.org · on HN as mwilliamsonprogrammingcareer
Mike's corner of the web is a personal blog at mike.zwobble.org about programming and career. Since 2012, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for a Prolog example post. One commenter, in a VisiCalc thread, suggests Prolog or Datalog for the spreadsheet-style problem and cites this post as a relevant example of solving it in Prolog.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
As an example of taking this to an extreme, I was at a coderetreat where we had to implement Conway's Game of Life without any if statements (or similar, such as switches) -- we had to use polymorphism instead. The result was that my partner and I ended up reimplementing a subset of the natural numbers as distinct classes. http://mike.zwobble.org/2012/12/polymorphism-and-reimplement... I'm definitely not advocating…
Comment linking /2012/12/polymorphism-and-reimplementing-integers/
on “IF-less programming”Submitted My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry as a story · 701 points
HN discussionHave you looked into prolog/datalog? You're dancing around many of the same ideas, including backwards execution, constraint programming, stratification, and finding possible values. Here's a relevant example of someone solving a problem like this in prolog: https://mike.zwobble.org/2013/11/fun-with-prolog-write-an-al...
Comment linking /2013/11/fun-with-prolog-write-an-algorithm-then-run-it-backwards/
on “VisiCalc Reconstructed”Submitted Don't make big decisions, make big decisions irrelevant as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reflections on “Testing Without Mocks” as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Converting docx to clean HTML: handling the XML structure mismatch as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Nope: a statically-typed subset of Python that compiles to JavaScript and C# as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted External code quality and libification as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Test reuse as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Show HN: spur.py: A simplified interface for SSH and subprocess in Python as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Peaks and troughs in software development as a story · 1 points
HN discussion