Top all-time · #2133
Raphael Poss
Personal blog · science.raphael.poss.nameprogrammingpolitics
Raphael Poss's personal blog at science.raphael.poss.name covers programming and politics. Since 2014, 34 different Hacker News readers have linked it 48 times, most often “Rust for functional programmers”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (24) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Raphael Poss's blog for 'Rust for functional programmers', a side-by-side guide for FP-minded readers, plus posts on Go calling conventions and binary size, a programming competency matrix and category theory.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 24 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Raphael Poss builds tools and programs that help people live with more dignity and agency. Founder of Q10E Labs; councillor in Diemen (D66).
Most-linked posts?
- Rust for functional programmers13 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2014-07-13
- A CEFR-like approach to measure programming proficiency (2014)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-12-01
- The Go low-level calling convention on x86-644 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-04-02
- Measuring multiple return values in Go and C++3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-08-21
- How Good Are You At Programming3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-07-14
- Haskell for OCaml programmers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-06-19
What Hacker News says?
I think the situation of your [1] is that Rust has ended up close enough to C++ that it's useful and meaningful to provide a translation guide between concepts, to help C++ programmers get up to speed more easily; it's certainly not a design document or anything like that. Maybe I'm missing your point. (As I said elsewhere, C++ has had a lot of experience in this space, and so has a lot of good ideas, Rust is not as…
Comment linking /rust-for-functional-programmers.html
on “The Road to Rust 1.0”Submitted Rust for functional programmers as a story · 199 points
HN discussionI'm the author of the article linked in this entry and https://science.raphael.poss.name/go-calling-convention-x86-... , and this is IMHO the best comment in this thread.
Comment linking /go-calling-convention-x86-64.html
on “Why are my Go executable files so large?”Submitted Size visualization of Go executables using D3 as a story · 125 points
HN discussionSomething like this: 1) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014193311... (PDF: https://science.raphael.poss.name/pub/poss.13.micpro.pdf ) "The Apple-CORE project has co-designed a general machine model and concurrency control interface with dedicated hardware support for concurrency management across multiple cores. Its SVP interface combines dataflow synchronisation with imperative programming, towar…
Comment linking /pub/poss.15.tpds.pdf
on “Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes”Submitted Haskell for OCaml programmers as a story · 54 points
HN discussionRust is actually a contender in this space as well [0]. It is not something that is widely touted, maybe because of a fear that an FP-label would give rust an academic tinge? This is one of the reasons I will dedicate this year's advent of code [1] to learning rust. [0]: https://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-progra... [1]: https://adventofcode.com/
Comment linking /rust-for-functional-programmers.html
on “OCaml for the Masses (2011)”Submitted How Good Are You At Programming as a story · 24 points
HN discussionhttp://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program...
Comment linking /rust-for-functional-programmers.html
on “Humble Bundle Books: Functional Programming”Submitted Rust for Functional Programmers as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> I'd love to hear the argument that says that it is... http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program... I personally think Rust isn't functional, but rather multi-paradigm with a strong functional influence. But if you were to add TCO and a few other features, I think Rust would be a full-blown functional language, so it may get there yet. In any case, it's useless arguing over (should have known bet…
Comment linking /rust-for-functional-programmers.html
on “How to stop functional programming”Submitted The Dark Resistance as a story · 6 points
HN discussionwhich is useful, except as far as I'm aware it doesn't cover this case. The original is at: https://science.raphael.poss.name/go-executable-size-visuali...
Comment linking /go-executable-size-visualization-with-d3.html
on “Self-Contained Pure-Go Web Server with Lua, MD, HTTP/2, QUIC, Redis Support”Submitted The Go low-level calling convention on x86-64 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis matrix uses period-sensitive knowledge as milestones and is esentially focused on knowledge (how much one knows) as opposed to proficiency in the programming activities. I found it more useful to evaluate competency based on activities instead of particular data structures / algorithms / languages: http://science.raphael.poss.name/programming-levels.html
Comment linking /programming-levels.html
on “Programmer Competency Matrix (2016)”Submitted Measuring multiple return values in Go and C++ as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is the approach proposed in http://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2015.2492542 (preprint: https://science.raphael.poss.name/pub/poss.15.tpds.pdf )
Comment linking /pub/poss.15.tpds.pdf
on “Intel and AMD Contemplate Different Replacements for x86 Interrupt Handling”Submitted Measuring multiple return values in Go and C++ as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAs a scientific programmer interested in functional-flavoured (ie undogmatic) languages, I would do Rust immediately if it had a REPL. Dying to dump Python. This post is very convincing on Rust's design decisions: http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program... This post was a total revelation to me, even if I assume it's well known in the community, because it is very credible on the Sophie's Choice…
Comment linking /rust-for-functional-programmers.html
on “New Rust hash table leads Benchmarks Game”Submitted Haskell for OCaml programmers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWhat about two intros? One for the low levelers, one for the high levelers? It's extra work, but it allows to treat more appropriately what each side needs to learn. As [1] says: "Rust for C programmers != Rust for functional programmers." [1] http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program...
Comment linking /rust-for-functional-programmers.html
on “An alternative introduction to Rust”Submitted The Go low-level calling convention on x86-64 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBy reference to HM, I mean to illustrate that Rust has fundamental similarities to the typed lambda calculus, which has been done more formally by Rust Belt. Additionally, traits in rust are highly similar to type classes in, say, Haskell. Describing rust as a functional language is reasonable, see eg http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program...
Comment linking /rust-for-functional-programmers.html
on “State of Multicore OCaml [pdf]”Submitted Haskell for OCaml programmers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSure -- basically what you said: http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program... Of course it's not exactly Haskell, but it's arguably closer to FP than it is to C, yet manages to be approachable to imperative programmers. I think this is fantastic.
Comment linking /rust-for-functional-programmers.html
on “Operating System Development in Rust”Submitted Measuring errors vs. exceptions in Go and C++ as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's a post that compares the two pretty well, though it assumes you know a bit of some ML-style language: http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program...
Comment linking /rust-for-functional-programmers.html
on “How Rust Gets Polymorphism Right [video]”Submitted Measuring multiple return values in Go and C++ as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'd describe it more as uglyfied Haskell, but anyway: http://science.raphael.poss.name/rust-for-functional-program...
Comment linking /rust-for-functional-programmers.html
on “So you're learning OCaml”Submitted How good are you at programming? CEFR measure of programming proficiency as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
