Top all-time · #304
Rob Pike
Personal blog · commandcenter.blogspot.comprogrammingsystems
Rob Pike writes command center, a personal blog at commandcenter.blogspot.com about programming and systems. Since 2009, 164 different Hacker News readers have linked it 208 times, most often “Less is Exponentially More (2012)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it, 3 are critical?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Rob Pike's blog, mainly his 2012 post 'Less is exponentially more' on why Go was designed and who adopted it, plus posts on byte order and Go's design. Most comments cite it as support.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- one commenter calls a Pike post on Go's design a great blog post; another calls the byte-order post very good
- Criticised for · 3 comments
- called rude, a strawman conflating polymorphism types, 'woefully wrong'; pattern called boilerplate, not immutable
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Less is Exponentially More (2012)41 people · 61 mentions · first linked 2016-06-07
- Less is exponentially more22 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2012-06-25
- The Byte Order Fallacy14 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2018-01-19
- The self-referential functional option pattern in Golang10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2017-02-22
- Color blindness6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-09-29
- Self-referential functions and the design of options (2014)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-01-25
- The byte order fallacy5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-04-04
- A Unix Quiz (With Answers)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-01-22
- Esmerelda's imagination5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-01-01
- Go: What we got right, what we got wrong4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-01-04
What Hacker News says?
> Go is purpose-built for writing web services Is this true? Go was built specifically for C++ developers, which, even when Go was first release, was a pretty unpopular language for writing web services (though maybe not at Google?). That a non-trivial number of Ruby/Python/Node developers switched was unexpected. (1) https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
Comment linking /2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html
on “Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust”Submitted Go: What we got right, what we got wrong as a story · 642 points
HN discussionWas it Rob Pike's post on (the inaccuracy of the term) color blindness? https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/09/color-blindness-i...
Comment linking /2020/09/color-blindness-is-inaccurate-term.html
on “CSS Gradients that avoid the “gray dead zone””Submitted Color blindness as a story · 321 points
HN discussionThere is no philosophical or technical continuity. Go is really not the continuation of anything from Bell labs, not the philosophy, not the technologies, and not even its purposes. Go was created at Google, for Google, by Google employees. They looked at how Google was using C++ at that time, sat down, and created a new language that would suit that task more. Here's an article of what and how by Rob Pike https://c…
Comment linking /2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html
on “Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS”Submitted Go: Ten years and climbing as a story · 320 points
HN discussionYes, as per Rob Pike’s comments on the subject: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
Comment linking /2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html
on “24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse”Submitted Less is exponentially more as a story · 235 points
HN discussion- ot · 2025-09-12
> It was so easy once we saw it that there was no reason to keep the placemat for notes, and we left it behind. Or maybe we did bring it back to the lab; I'm not sure. But it's gone now. https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/utf-8-turned-20-y...
Comment linking /2020/01/utf-8-turned-20-years-old-in-2012.html
on “UTF-8 is a brilliant design” Submitted The power of role models as a story · 190 points
HN discussionI used that pattern for a while but stopped using it. I first encountered it from this blog post: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2014/01/self-referential-... It's a lot of boilerplate to create something that's not actually immutable. It also makes it harder to figure out which options are available, since now you can't just look at the documentation of the type, you have to look at the whole module package to f…
Comment linking /2014/01/self-referential-functions-and-design.html
on “How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years”Submitted Less is Exponentially More (2012) as a story · 145 points
HN discussionTake a look at this article/talk https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti... He's explicitly rude. Sets up a strawman argument with the developer who can't imagine programming without generics. Mocks the people who want generics. Gasps in faux disbelief that it could be solved by types. And then, when he goes in for the kill, to show once and for all that generics are pointless garbage: He attack…
Comment linking /2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html
on “Toward Go 2”Submitted My black body story (it's physics) as a story · 133 points
HN discussionBecause originally Go was designed while Pike and others were waiting on C++ builds and he couldn't grasp why C++ developers don't jump of joy into adopting Go. > We—Ken, Robert and myself—were C++ programmers when we designed a new language to solve the problems that we thought needed to be solved for the kind of software we wrote. It seems almost paradoxical that other C++ programmers don't seem to care. https://c…
Comment linking /2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html
on “The Next Step for Generics”Submitted Thank you Apple as a story · 129 points
HN discussionYou should not directly use structs for data serialization. If you end up having to support a big endian platform, your structure orders will change, not to mention potential packing issues as you said. https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/04/byte-order-fallac...
Comment linking /2012/04/byte-order-fallacy.html?m=1
on “Use mmap with care”Submitted Rob Pike on regular expressions in lexing and parsing as a story · 128 points
HN discussion> I'm not really sure that they target C++ or aim to replace it, unlike D. The evolution of both Go's and Rust's strategies as "replacement" languages is actually pretty interesting. While Go's official marketing no longer calls it a systems language, the use of that phrase when Go was originally released does indicate that that they envisioned Go to be a "better C" in a sense (perhaps specifically in the sense of b…
Comment linking /2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html
on “D Language accepted for inclusion in GCC”Submitted Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC as a story · 118 points
HN discussionWhat? Here is Rob Pike blog post about instead of getting C and C++ developers, they got the dynamic language folks. https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
Comment linking /2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html
on “Go has added Valgrind support”Submitted The Upspin manifesto: On the ownership and sharing of data (2014) as a story · 107 points
HN discussionA few more explanations by Rob Pike, featuring words such as “normal trichromat human pigment spectra” and “scattered light”: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/09/color-blindness-i...
Comment linking /2020/09/color-blindness-is-inaccurate-term.html
on “Dracula Theme – A dark theme for many different apps”Submitted The byte order fallacy as a story · 107 points
HN discussion> C++ is about as far from Go as you can imagine a language. Maybe only Prolog would be a worse comparison point. https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti... /headscratch EDIT: I think you're misinterpreting syntax of the language with use case. e.g. low level vs high level programming language
Comment linking /2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html
on “Go is not an easy language”Submitted Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC (2019) as a story · 104 points
HN discussionExcept that lots of new code also get written in those languages. Google's major Go projects appear to be gVisor, Android GPGPU debugger, Fucshia's TCP/IP stack and volume management tools and the download server as it was done by the Go team. https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
Comment linking /2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html
on “Why Go and Not Rust?”Submitted Error handling in Upspin as a story · 88 points
HN discussionRob Pike has a great blog post that talks about the creation of Go and expected adoption vs where many of them ended up migrating from https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
Comment linking /2012/06/less-is-exponentially-more.html?m=1
on “The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y””Submitted Rob Pike on Richard Stallman as a story · 85 points
HN discussion
