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Room101
Personal blog · blog.bracha.orgprogrammingphilosophy
Room101 is a personal blog at blog.bracha.org about programming and philosophy. Since 2021, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “How Is a Programmer Like a Pathologist?”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Gilad Bracha's Room101 blog for its essays on Smalltalk, Newspeak and language design, such as the Primordial Soup and Resilient papers. Comments cite these as sources rather than praising them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- How Is a Programmer Like a Pathologist?4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-08-13
- What You Want Is What You Get2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-20
What Hacker News says?
There's a lot of language semantics which make the REPL convenient to write interesting amounts of code in, Gilad Bracha details some in < https://blog.bracha.org/primordialsoup.html?snapshot=Amplefo... > (with the message reflected in the medium, embedding the Newspeak IDE in the document for examples). It's unrelated to compiling or interpreting; many Common Lisp implementations will compile code from the REPL too.
Comment linking /primordialsoup.html?snapshot=AmpleforthViewer.vfuel&docName=ReplacingREPLs
on “A Road to Common Lisp (2018)”Submitted Breaking Silos as a story · 50 points
HN discussionhttps://github.com/newspeaklanguage https://newspeaklanguage.org https://blog.bracha.org
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Best codebases to study to learn software design?”Submitted W(h)ither Programming? as a story · 14 points
HN discussion*iirc* pretty much all of the Smalltalks (that was CUIS). ~ "Creating blocks in Smalltalk has always been a potential source of performance problems. … In Resilient, we have restricted blocks to be last in-first-out (LIFO)…" https://blog.bracha.org/resilient-paper.pdf ~ "Digitalk’s Team/V unobtrusively introduced a non-reflective syntax…" https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914
Comment linking /resilient-paper.pdf
on “Reflections on 2 years of CPython's JIT Compiler”Submitted Substrates: Thru the Looking Glass as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> distinction between an interface/typeclass or whatever, and a concrete type. This is the essence of OOP. "The notion of an interface is what truly characterizes objects - not classes, not inheritance, not mutable state. Read William Cook's classic essay for a deep discussion on this." - Gilad Bracha https://blog.bracha.org/primordialsoup.html?snapshot=Amplefo... http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf
Comment linking /primordialsoup.html?snapshot=AmpleforthViewer.vfuel&docName=TheProspectOfAnExecution
on “Revisiting Interface Segregation in Go”Submitted What You Want Is What You Get as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIn Smalltalk, the code lives inside the image. You can dump it to a file/set of files using "file-out" operation, and import it from files with file-in. But the code is never executed directly from the files - it's parsed, compiled, and executed on read, which creates runtime representation of the code which is saved in the image. When you break into a debugger in the running Smalltalk image, it works on top of the…
Comment linking /exemplarDemo/exemplar2021.html?snapshot=BankAccountExemplarDemo.vfuel
on “What are the enduring innovations of Lisp? (2022)”Submitted How Is a Programmer Like a Pathologist? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThese types of integrations are nice and very much appreciated as a way of demonstrating the liveness of the code. I have taught a few courses using these types of live evaluation plugins and the question students always have next is "How can I draw a line or modify the text in the browser itself?" There are several live document editing solutions out there and a recent interesting one comes from Gilad Bracha's News…
Comment linking /WYWIWYG/out/WYWIWYG.html?snapshot=WYWIWYGApp.vfuel
on “A New Way of Blogging About Common Lisp (2018)”Submitted How Is a Programmer Like a Pathologist? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionReading this book brought me a better understanding of "the expression problem" and the use of the visitor pattern as its solution. This led me to (finally) grok the use of Class _Heirarchy_ Inheritance[0] as a solution not requiring visitors. In Newspeak[1], classes can contain nested classes, so when you subclass a class, you inherit the nested classes as well. This blog post discusses the same feature affording F…
Comment linking /primordialsoup.html?snapshot=AmpleforthViewer.vfuel&docName=FreeObjectAlgebras
on “Crafting Interpreters”Submitted How Is a Programmer Like a Pathologist? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWell, they're consistent at least. It was exactly the same when I first tried Pharo, at version 2.something IIRC. Same in Pharo 5, 7, 9 (increments of 2 purely coincidental) and now with 11. I love Smalltalk. The language is great, incredibly powerful even though it rests on just a few simple concepts. The design and architecture of some of Smalltalk libraries is marvelous and should be made into UNESCO world herita…
Comment linking /exemplarDemo/exemplar2021.html?snapshot=BankAccountExemplarDemo.vfuel
on “Pharo 11”Submitted How Is a Programmer Like a Pathologist? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
