Top all-time · #7785
Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan
Personal blog · rkrishnan.org/posts · on HN as vu3rddprogrammingsystems
Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan's personal blog at rkrishnan.org covers programming and systems. Since 2013, 10 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-03, 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 this blog for posts on groff/troff typesetting, including how the Go book was typeset, and on functional programming topics like error handling and Wadler's list-of-successes paper.
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?
- Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-04-11
- /files/wadler-1985.pdf2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-06-19
What Hacker News says?
As a tangent, I remain impressed by manpage's staying power. GNU tried to move ahead with Info, a tree-based doc format and viewer, but that never really seems to have taken off, possibly due to UI issues (I'm always confused about how to use it) It's a pity: have you tried searching for something in, say, Bash's manpage? It's just a flattened version of its doc, and you're completely flooded with search results. I…
Comment linking /posts/2016-03-07-how-is-gopl-typeset.html
on “Colorized man pages”Submitted Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book as a story · 224 points
HN discussionI have more or less the same opinions as you. I wrote my browsing setup optimized for privacy here: http://rkrishnan.org/posts/2013-12-01-firefox-privacy.html Comments and further improvements welcome.
Comment linking /posts/2013-12-01-firefox-privacy.html
on “NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking”Submitted The Rsync Algorithm (2016) as a story · 18 points
HN discussion> the problem is one of call/return in general, whether expressed in an FP language or not. It really wants to return something This is certainly a problem with first-order programming, where we might have function signatures like: foo : A -> B bar : B -> C baz : C -> D And we plumb them together into: quux : A -> D quux x = baz (bar (foo x)) IIUC the problem you're describing is that a change causes one of these fu…
Comment linking /files/wadler-1985.pdf
on “Railway-Oriented Programming (2015)”Submitted Brian Kernighan on the typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” book (2016) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHmmm, I think there is some subtlety here in terms of the way an empty list is used in Haskell. This paper by Wadler from the 80s (predating monads) discusses the functional lore of the combinator approach to parsing, and it significantly leverages the properties of [] to represent failure. It's a "semipredicate" type of situation, where the return value is either a list or failure; conveniently, the empty list isn'…
Comment linking /files/wadler-1985.pdf
on “McCarthy's Ambiguous Operator (2005)”Submitted Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI like this list, although I want to nitpick the use of the word "monad", since it seems to (a) put people off these ideas, either due to them seeming scary or pompous/ivory-tower and (b) confuse those who are otherwise receptive to the idea. Rather than call this "monadic error handling", I'd just say that results are wrapped up so that errors can be distinguished from successful results. Usually that's done by wra…
Comment linking /files/wadler-1985.pdf
on “Let’s stop copying C (2016)”Submitted Atomically Writing Contents into a File (2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> I mean, as long as you have a flatMap/concatMap function JavaScript arrays are technically a monad too. But that is a practically meaningless thing to say. It's not "practically meaningless"; it's depth-first-search logic programming (as per How to Replace Failure by a List of Successes https://rkrishnan.org/files/wadler-1985.pdf )
Comment linking /files/wadler-1985.pdf
on “How side effects work in FP”I don't find FP those concepts any harder to grok than GoF design patterns (in fact, I've never actually gone through the latter in depth; I just see them mentioned occasionally and have learned some via osmosis). In fact, those particular concepts you list at the end (monad, monoid, functor) are particularly easy: they're just different ways to think about lists (which we can then generalise to other things). I thi…
Comment linking /files/wadler-1985.pdf
on “Haskell GHC 9.0.1-alpha”The Go Programming Language by Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan [1], published in 2016, was typeset using groff [2]. [1] http://www.gopl.io/ch1.pdf [2] http://rkrishnan.org/posts/2016-03-07-how-is-gopl-typeset.ht...
Comment linking /posts/2016-03-07-how-is-gopl-typeset.html
on “For the Love of Troff (2020) [pdf]”The Go Programming Language book, published 08/2015, was typeset using troff (well, groff, the GNU version). Maybe because it was written by Kernighan (of K&R C fame): https://rkrishnan.org/posts/2016-03-07-how-is-gopl-typeset.h... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11470905
Comment linking /posts/2016-03-07-how-is-gopl-typeset.html
on “40-Plus Years of Man Page History”The two that come to mind are ConTeXt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt (official: https://contextgarden.net ) and DocBook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook (official: https://docbook.org ). There are others, but they're less-serious and often not general purpose. Then there's the entire class of Markdown-based solutions (I personally wouldn't attempt academic work with any of those). The other typesetting s…
Comment linking /posts/2016-03-07-how-is-gopl-typeset.html
on “Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?”Here’s one approach: https://rkrishnan.org/posts/2016-03-07-how-is-gopl-typeset.h...
Comment linking /posts/2016-03-07-how-is-gopl-typeset.html
on “Ask HN: How did you author and typeset your technical book?”
