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Rants from the Ballmer Peak
Personal blog · gradha.github.ioprogramming
Rants from the Ballmer Peak is a personal blog at gradha.github.io about programming. Since 2014, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Swift string interpolation with Nimrod macros”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-03-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's posts on the Nim language (formerly Nimrod), Go, and cross-platform development. Commenters cite them as sources in threads on Nim and compile-to-C languages, without judging them.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- Swift string interpolation with Nimrod macros2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-11-14
- Goodbye Nim, and Good Luck2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-02-09
- The day Go reinvented macros (2015)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-20
What Hacker News says?
I really dislike this policy when applied to programming languages. Things from pop culture are going to be referred to pervasively in the media and blogosphere, but programming languages don't get there without massive marketing pushes, press releases, etc. That doesn't mean a language is not itself notable. Anyway, there's plenty about Nim that is not primary: http://goran.krampe.se/2014/10/13/here-comes-nim/ http…
Comment linking /articles/2014/03/nimrod-for-cross-platform-software.html
on “Nim (formerly Nimrod) 0.10.2 released”Submitted Goodbye Nim, and Good Luck as a story · 51 points
HN discussionHave you read the following article? https://gradha.github.io/articles/2015/02/goodbye-nim-and-go... I'm curious about your thoughts on it being that the author speaks about some areas you're currently talking about.
Comment linking /articles/2015/02/goodbye-nim-and-good-luck.html
on “Author of “Unix in Rust” Abandons Rust in Favour of Nim”Submitted Swift string interpolation with Nimrod macros as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAndroid Studio will soon feature NDK integration. You can reuse C/C++ code on Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS, achieving native performance everywhere, and then use the recommended GUI toolkit on each platform [i]. However, C/C++ is intimidating, which is why I think compile-to-C programming languages like Nimrod [ii] are going to be the next big thing. [i] https://gradha.github.io/articles/2014/03/nimrod-for-cross-p... […
Comment linking /articles/2014/03/nimrod-for-cross-platform-software.html
on “The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of”Submitted The day Go reinvented macros (2015) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> There's a reason languages like C# or Go don't have them, Go has a quasi macro system though (go generate) https://gradha.github.io/articles/2015/01/the-day-go-reinven... I like the macro systems in Crystal and Haxe (reifed macros) https://haxe.org/manual/macro-reification-expression.html https://crystal-lang.org/reference/1.8/syntax_and_semantics/... I think C would have benefited from such system at the AST leve…
Comment linking /articles/2015/01/the-day-go-reinvented-macros.html
on “Macro-ts: TypeScript compiler with typesafe syntactic macros (2022)”Submitted Swift string interpolation with Nim macros as a story · 2 points
HN discussion