Top all-time · #4754
Piers Cawley
Personal blog · bofh.org.ukprogramming
Piers Cawley writes Just a Summary, a personal blog at bofh.org.uk about programming. Since 2008, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Piers Cawley's bofh.org.uk for posts on running a bakery with Emacs and PostgreSQL, his move from software engineer to baker, SICP translated to JavaScript, and Moose for Ruby.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Piers Cawley practices punditry
Most-linked posts?
- Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL6 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-02-26
- Higher Order Javascript2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-11-18
- Falling out of love with a language2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-03-10
- A Tale of Two Languages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-07-26
What Hacker News says?
Corel's office suite has a scripting language if I recall. My grandfather in law learned enough of it to develop a few systems for managing family finances, gifting (it's a large family), etc. Emacs is notable. It requires learning a bit of elisp programming but, like a browser, is basically a development environment that gives you access to a windowing system, input from the user, image rendering, text buffers, etc…
Comment linking /2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/
on “Folk Interfaces”Submitted Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL as a story · 465 points
HN discussionObvious objections - JS has no tail call elimination, no macros, and state-changing is managed with entirely different conventions in Scheme. Also the conceit of SICP (not really justified) is that they don't have to teach you syntax, because homoiconicity. Still, I think it's a worthy pursuit to try to bring the insights of this book to a wider audience. Side note: the navigation is really irritating. The back butt…
Comment linking /2010/11/18/higher-order-javascript
on “SICP translated to JavaScript”Submitted Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019) as a story · 193 points
HN discussionI don't have much to add to this but it reminded me of this blog article about running a bakery business on Postgres and Emacs https://bofh.org.uk/2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/ there's also a few more articles on that blog about his transition from Software Engineer to Baker. I have no idea if he stuck with it, maybe you could reach out to him? Edit: although the website is down the Twitter and Facebook pages for th…
Comment linking /2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/
on “Ask HN: Is Anyone Here a Professional Baker?”Submitted Turing as a story · 49 points
HN discussionHowever even Jim Weirich doesn't like Rake being called a "DSL". I think Piers Cawley was dead on by calling things like this a Pidgin refs: * http://www.infoq.com/interviews/jim-weirich-discusses-rake * http://www.bofh.org.uk/2007/08/08/domain-specific-pidgin
Comment linking /2007/08/08/domain-specific-pidgin
on “The Building Blocks of Ruby”Submitted Higher Order Javascript as a story · 13 points
HN discussionThis is not my hack, but I thought it was worth linking to. Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL: https://bofh.org.uk/2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/
Comment linking /2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/
on “Ask HN: What's the weirdest/best thing you've done with Emacs?”Submitted A Tale of Two Languages as a story · 10 points
HN discussionAs someone who is enjoy eating a lot of bread (part of my Balkan culture), I'm baffled to see so much hesitation toward bread when I go abroad. I'd frequently get plenty of food in restaurants, but not so much bread with it. Even if I get it, either it is something old or "too much white" for my taste (this means there is nothing in it useful for the body). Although we have plenty of bakeries with fresh bread 24/7,…
Comment linking /2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/
on “Breaking Bread: The dark and white flours of ideology”Submitted Falling out of love with a language as a story · 6 points
HN discussionor Pidgin ;-) ref: http://www.bofh.org.uk/2007/08/08/domain-specific-pidgin
Comment linking /2007/08/08/domain-specific-pidgin
on “Writing a DSL with Python”Submitted London.pm Presentation Video (An introduction to MooseX::Declare) as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> how about recommended levels of vitamin D? That's directly influenced by pigmentation. People generally don't consider dark skinned Indians and dark skinned Nigerians and dark skinned Peruvians to be the same race because they all have dark skin. They're just as different from each other as they are from me despite having more melanin. > It seems apparent to me that there are at least _some_ cases where the social…
Comment linking /2018/10/25/devils-advocacy-without-tears/
on “A biased test kept Black people from getting a kidney transplant”Submitted A recipe is just a directed acyclic graph as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou must be in a different echo chamber then ;-) Here are some interesting recent blogs for non Perl echo chamber members.... * http://www.bofh.org.uk/2009/02/20/marking-time * http://www.bofh.org.uk/2009/02/22/moose-for-ruby-programmers * http://www.bofh.org.uk/2009/03/11/writing-parsers-for-fun-an... * http://www.bofh.org.uk/2009/03/13/magic-vs-mundane-keeping-t... * http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/03/worki…
Comment linking /2009/03/13/magic-vs-mundane-keeping-them-apart
on “A web service to unshorten short URLs, in modern Perl”Submitted A tale of two languages (Desperate Perl and Large Scale Perl) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionvia http://www.bofh.org.uk/2010/03/10/falling-out-of-love-with-a...
Comment linking /2010/03/10/falling-out-of-love-with-a-language
on “Moose for ruby programmers (video, 18mins)”Submitted Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Class decomposition and a handy delegation pattern as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Warnings are the new test failures as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A tip for all programmers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Moose for Ruby Programmers (Perl MooseX::Declare) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
