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mishadoff thoughts
Personal blog · mishadoff.com/blogprogramming
mishadoff thoughts is a personal blog at mishadoff.com about programming. Since 2015, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Clojure Design Patterns”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-05-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link mishadoff's posts on design patterns in Clojure, which argue that many classic patterns become trivial in Lisp, plus pieces on JVM and low-latency programming like sun.misc.Unsafe.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Clojure Design Patterns7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-12-18
- /blog/clojure-design-patterns/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-09-19
- Java Magic. Part 4: Sun.misc.Unsafe4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-09-01
What Hacker News says?
Design patterns are language independent, but a lot of the ones many Java devs focus on are a bit meh. In a world with only assembly language, for instance, it’s a bit like making a big deal about a “guarded repetition” pattern (aka a while loop). Eg in Lisps, a lot of patterns become one-liners. At that point these patterns become a “can you write decent Lisp” question[1]. [1] https://mishadoff.com/blog/clojure-des…
Comment linking /blog/clojure-design-patterns/
on “Patterns.dev”Submitted Clojure Design Patterns as a story · 315 points
HN discussionThere is an open-source project by LMAX (a forex trading company) called Disruptor[1] that squeezes as much as possible out of the JVM. It's awesome. I ported it to C++ years ago when I wanted to learn about low-latency techniques. However, if you look at the code they need to actually break out of the JVM's safety net to get the performance they need[2]. I couldn't help but ask myself why they didn't just use C++,…
Comment linking /blog/java-magic-part-4-sun-dot-misc-dot-unsafe/
on “Chromium project finds that 70% of security defects are memory safety problems”Submitted Design Patterns in Clojure as a story · 155 points
HN discussionYou can slap "command pattern" on anything. But I'm speaking directly in the traditional form that implies a OO type hierarchy. You don't need that at all. Here is a "proof" of sorts: http://mishadoff.com/blog/clojure-design-patterns/#episode-1...
Comment linking /blog/clojure-design-patterns/
on “Do We Worship Complexity?”Submitted Java Magic: 0xCAFEBABE as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis is very similar to Java's CMS collector[1]. Unfortunately, 10ms is still far too long for some applications. I have hopes for something like Azul's pauseless GC[2] eventually becoming a common GC strategy, but I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, there's always sun.misc.Unsafe[3] in the JVM world :-( [1] - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/vm/gc... [2] - http://www.azulsystems.com/zi…
Comment linking /blog/java-magic-part-4-sun-dot-misc-dot-unsafe/
on “Go GC: Prioritizing low latency and simplicity”Submitted Clojure Design Patterns (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Java doesn’t have unsafe code at all, not even in standard library, and it’s very hard to interop with. Isn’t all JNI code in Java considered unsafe? Then there is http://mishadoff.com/blog/java-magic-part-4-sun-dot-misc-dot...
Comment linking /blog/java-magic-part-4-sun-dot-misc-dot-unsafe/
on “Catching use-after-move C++ bugs with Clang's consumed annotations”Submitted Design Patterns in Clojure (2015) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> The second best explanation is that patterns are often a sign of shortcomings in the language Agree. Came across a blogpost that describes this very well by using Clojure as an example: http://mishadoff.com/blog/clojure-design-patterns/
Comment linking /blog/clojure-design-patterns/
on ““Design Patterns” Aren't (2002)”Submitted Clojure Design Patterns as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> The open question in my mind is whether pure functional languages scale well to problems of real life complexity. I came across this website [0] on news.yc way back when: It has a nice one-to-one mapping of GoF design patterns in C++/Java to Clo j ure. > The open question in my mind is whether pure functional languages scale well to problems of real life complexity OCaml [1] really shines in this aspect having use…
Comment linking /blog/clojure-design-patterns/
on “Why I Prefer Functional Programming”Submitted Java Magic. Part 4: Sun.misc.Unsafe as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Functional programming can express patterns just as well as OOP. No! Patterns are just crutches for missing language features or "design patterns are bug reports against your programming language." GoF patterns are concepts useful in OOP, but the recurring patterns and architectures you see in other paradigms are totally different. And they don't apply to Lisp: https://www.norvig.com/design-patterns/ Most don't ev…
Comment linking /blog/clojure-design-patterns/
on “Don't Be Afraid of Types”Submitted Design Patterns in Clojure as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere is a functional core in js, and as such it might be an idea to take a look at common OOP design patterns and how they translate to an FP approach. This is Clojure based, but there is a lot of similarity to js once you get past the syntax: https://mishadoff.com/blog/clojure-design-patterns/
Comment linking /blog/clojure-design-patterns/
on “Ask HN: Changing my mind about JavaScript”Submitted Java Magic. Part 5: SecurityManager (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI have found this to be a good read[1]. Examples are in clojure but will apply to other dynamic languages with first-class functions etc. [1]: http://mishadoff.com/blog/clojure-design-patterns/
Comment linking /blog/clojure-design-patterns/
on “Design Patterns: Factory Pattern, Part 1”
