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Reasonably Polymorphic
Personal blog · reasonablypolymorphic.comprogrammingmath
Reasonably Polymorphic is a personal blog at reasonablypolymorphic.com about programming and math. Since 2016, 73 different Hacker News readers have linked it 104 times, most often “Elm is Wrong”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Elm is Wrong7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-11-08
- Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-04-24
- /blog/elm-is-wrong/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-06-06
- Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-08-04
- How These Things Work – A book about CS from first principles (2016)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-11-03
- Higher-Kinded Data3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-10-05
- Protobuffers Are Wrong3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-10-25
- Haskell2020 Is Dead, but All Hope Is Not Lost (2019)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-01-12
- Protobuffers Are Wrong3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-10-11
- How to write technical posts so people will read them (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-20
What Hacker News says?
Neat, and it looks like it's under a 3-clause BSD license, too: https://github.com/isovector/reasonablypolymorphic.com/blob/... And it's tackling pretty advanced material — a bunch of category-theory stuff that I have no idea about. This is exciting! It looks like maybe it's unfinished: https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/book/tying-it-all-together... ends, "Really, we’re just getting started," and then (the current v…
Comment linking /book/tying-it-all-together.html
on “How These Things Work – A book about CS from first principles (2016)”Submitted How These Things Work – A book about CS from first principles (2016) as a story · 688 points
HN discussionHaskell does monomorphization as well. See https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/specialization/
Comment linking /blog/specialization/
on “Generics can make your Go code slower”Submitted Elm is Wrong as a story · 338 points
HN discussionGreat article! I have no experience with Elm but I'm much more likely to try it out now. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this though: http://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/elm-is-wrong
Comment linking /blog/elm-is-wrong
on “Elm in Production: 25K Lines Later”Submitted Arguing against using protobuffers as a story · 307 points
HN discussionI used to like .proto, but I found this article recently and it made me reconsider: http://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/index...
Comment linking /blog/protos-are-wrong/index.html
on “gRPC-Web is going GA”Submitted Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google as a story · 303 points
HN discussionMonads for all your I/O yeah, probably kind of dumb. Monads as a tool for dealing with cross-cutting concerns? Ridiculously useful. http://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/ideas-and-men has some basic examples.
Comment linking /blog/ideas-and-men
on “Regex that only matches itself”Submitted How to write technical posts so people will read them (2019) as a story · 257 points
HN discussionWell here’s one example: https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/inde... . Another is the frat boy hazing code review culture. Heck there are plenty of noogler’s first code review memegens floating around. It’s totally not bullying it’s just joking right?
Comment linking /blog/protos-are-wrong/index.html
on “Why OKRs might not work at your company”Submitted Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018) as a story · 244 points
HN discussionI think it probably falls more into the category of removing a restriction rather than a new feature, but I'm still waiting on HKTs - not for traits (as a former die-hard haskeller, I have been gradually converted to the side of "rust doesn't need a Monad trait") but for data types. There's a design pattern in haskell called "Higher-Kinded-Data"[0] where you parametrize a datatype on a type-constructor, and use that…
Comment linking /blog/higher-kinded-data/
on “Rust const generics MVP hits beta”Submitted Protobuffers Are Wrong as a story · 229 points
HN discussionEverything here looks awesome! Except gRPC... I thought gRPC was great until I had to use it in anger. JSON or CBOR for me! https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/protos-are-wrong/
Comment linking /blog/protos-are-wrong/
on “Cadence: Uber's Workflow Orchestration Engine”Submitted Towards Tactic Metaprogramming in Haskell as a story · 219 points
HN discussionDespite being functional, Elm is quite minimalist when it comes to type system features. For example, functions can have generic type parameters, but there's no good way to require that the type be able to support certain operations, e.g. being printable as a string. Haskell's solution to this is "typeclasses", which are the same thing as Rust "traits" and Swift "protocols", and somewhat similar to Java "interfaces"…
Comment linking /blog/elm-is-wrong/
on “Why GitHub used Haskell for Semantic”Submitted Implement with types, not your brain (2019) as a story · 192 points
HN discussionA similar concept named "Tactics" was explored in Haskell. https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/towards-tactics/ HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24759649
Comment linking /blog/towards-tactics/
on “Rf: an experimental refactoring tool for Go”Submitted Using obscure graph theory to solve programming languages problems as a story · 106 points
HN discussionhttps://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/elm-is-wrong/ Here's a good starting place. Look for some discussions about typeclasses and read for yourself. Ask yourself if you'd bet on this person, and if you'd build critical tools for your org with a tool dictated by them. I have no ill will for Elm. I'm grateful it exists and that we can all learn. I'd never invest in it though, it's too much a risk for things that coul…
Comment linking /blog/elm-is-wrong/
on “F# is gaining independence from .NET”Submitted Implement with Types, Not Your Brain as a story · 103 points
HN discussionWhy not Elm on google turns up this: http://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/elm-is-wrong I think the basic gist was that it's type-system is far from complete.
Comment linking /blog/elm-is-wrong
on “Why Elm? [pdf]”Submitted Haskell2020 Is Dead, but All Hope Is Not Lost (2019) as a story · 84 points
HN discussionThis is ones of those essays that pops up on Hacker News every so often, and I'm always happy to reread it. Regardless of how the technologies have changed or if the prognostications were correct, this article is about timeless and relevant themes. Abstraction is the most powerful force within the human mind. It is perhaps solely responsible for the world we've built around us. But it is also absolutely terrifying h…
Comment linking /book/preface.html
on “In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)”Submitted Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google (2022) as a story · 20 points
HN discussionI have been looking at Elm as an example of how to engineer the ergonomics of a functional language, and how far one can come with a focus on simplicity and consistency. Unfortunately, it also looks like it is becoming an example of the problems of going too far. I don't actually mind Elm's weaknesses as discussed in the Elm Is Wrong essay[0] - these look like an ordinary technical trade-off - but the social consequ…
Comment linking /blog/elm-is-wrong
on “Do we need to move away from Elm?”Submitted A Book About: How These Things Work as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI'd like to refer you to the article that was posted earlier today on exactly this technique in Elm: http://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/elm-is-wrong
Comment linking /blog/elm-is-wrong
on “Elm from a Business Perspective”Submitted Dragging Haskell Kicking and Screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat as a story · 15 points
HN discussion
