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Quetzalcoatal
Personal blog · quetzalcoatal.blogspot.comprogrammingsystems
Quetzalcoatal is a personal blog at quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com about programming and systems. Since 2010, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Why software monocultures are bad”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Random stuff not at all related to misspelled Aztec gods
Most-linked posts?
- Why software monocultures are bad2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-16
What Hacker News says?
More like http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/search/label/mailnews
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on “Nylas Mail is now free”Submitted Why software monocultures are bad as a story · 18 points
HN discussionEmail is hard (I wrote a blog series on it at http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/search/label/email-hard , and I haven't even touched anything beyond the message format!). Some highlights: * The MIME and message format specifications are often implemented incorrectly (particularly whenever you deal with non-ASCII text!), so you need a lot of logic interpreting the mess that people think is a valid email. * IMAP is a…
Comment linking /search/label/email-hard
on “Thunderbird 68.0”Submitted Visualizing code coverage as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAnother, much longer and more technical view of the complexities of email clients: Why email is hard by Joshua Cranmer of Mozilla: http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2013/09/why-email-is-hard-...
Comment linking /2013/09/why-email-is-hard-part-1-architecture.html
on “Email made me miserable, so I decided to build my own email app from scratch”Submitted If You Want Fast Code, Don't Use Assembly (2014) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTake a look at http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-software-monoc... . The author points out how GCC's monopoly, though open source, forces clang to copy its implementation quirks almost exactly, because it's been the de-facto standard for years. Open-source doesn't automatically make the problem go away.
Comment linking /2013/02/why-software-monocultures-are-bad.html
on “Browser Wars, the game”Submitted Why e-mail is hard: i18n as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWindows-1252/ISO-8859-1 (the two charsets are so commonly conflated that it's often best to treat them as one) was the dominant [non-ASCII] charset of the web until around 2007 or 2008, and their prevalence more recently is only about 5%. A collection of Usenet messages gathered in 2014 (see http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2014/03/understanding-emai... for full details) showed that out of 1,000,000 messages, about…
Comment linking /2014/03/understanding-email-charsets.html
on “Unicode Is Awesome”Submitted A new JS MIME parser as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>> monoculture > Only a bad thing if proprietary [ http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-software-monoc... article), the first google result for "software monocultures bad" has a bunch of examples of bad effects from monocultures, even in open source software.
Comment linking /2013/02/why-software-monocultures-are-bad.html?m=1](this
on “Linux Runs All of the World’s Fastest Supercomputers”Submitted DXR: a smart code browser using instrumented compilers for static analysis as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSee also http://dxr.mozilla.org/clang/ , http://dxr.mozilla.org/clang/clang/include/clang/AST/Recursi... , and http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2011/07/dxr-alpha-2-releas... for some more information and a demo. DXR does a bunch of static analysis to provide an explorable, informative view of source code, with special emphasis on dealing with C and C++ macros.
Comment linking /2011/07/dxr-alpha-2-release.html
on “DXR: a smart code browser using instrumented compilers for static analysis”Submitted Dev Hints Mozilla Will Rebrand Thunderbird as Firefox Mail as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Autotools, how I hate thee as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted More code coverage treemap fun as a story · 1 points
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