Top all-time · #8465
Peter Hilton
Personal blog · hilton.org.uk/blogprogrammingdesign
Peter Hilton's personal blog at hilton.org.uk covers programming and design. Since 2014, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “Sort every collection you display: Unsorted is never the right order”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link Peter Hilton's talks on programming and naming, including a 2018 talk on beautiful code and a naming talk and podcast. One commenter credits the talk with asking the right questions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Peter Hilton’s personal web site
Most-linked posts?
- Sort every collection you display: Unsorted is never the right order2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-21
What Hacker News says?
Nerd Fonts contain glyphs that allow things like the git strip you see at the bottom of code editors ("powerline"), along with ligatures (e.g. if you type <= it merges so it looks more like the math symbol of a less than sign and a single line at the same angle just below the < sign...) https://www.nerdfonts.com/ And here's an example of ligatures (see the image on the right - you type what's on the left, and the ri…
Comment linking /blog/fira-code
on “Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager”Submitted George Orwell's six rules for Scala programmers as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSadly there really is not much. Glad that you're interested! This talk from 2018 is asking the right questions, though I'm not a huge fan of all his ideas: https://hilton.org.uk/presentations/beautiful-code I have a rough Google doc I've been dumping ideas and links into that I'd be happy to share. You can email me at <my username>@gmail.com Would love to collaborate to develop some ideas and build some prototypes t…
Comment linking /presentations/beautiful-code
on “Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?”Submitted Respect people’s full names: Don’t call someone’s name ‘invalid’ as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm sorry, but there's a great deal of literature in support of this idea that naming things /well/ is one of the harder problems of programming. If you're arguing that "fst" and "snd" are better names than "@1" and "@2" then I think we have a disagreement. None of those are good names. (All of those might be perfectly "sufficient" names, though. For a local variable, I would argue that spending any time at all on n…
Comment linking /blog/why-naming-things-is-hard
on “Ruby's Creed”Submitted Adopt Two Technology Generations as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI remember Peter Hilton giving a talk[0] and then speaking on a podcast[1] on the subject of naming. I thought at first it was him who was writing the book. Surprised that it wasn't :-) [0] - https://hilton.org.uk/presentations/naming [1] - https://www.se-radio.net/2016/12/se-radio-episode-278-peter-...
Comment linking /presentations/naming
on “Why we need a book about naming”Submitted Sort every collection you display: Unsorted is never the right order as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Sort every collection you output as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Software Review: Delibr as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Single-letter names – a cautionary tale as a story · 1 points
HN discussion