Top all-time · #1429
Michael Snoyman
Personal blog · snoyman.comprogrammingphilosophy
Michael Snoyman's personal blog at snoyman.com covers programming and philosophy. Since 2010, 52 different Hacker News readers have linked it 63 times, most often “Boring Haskell Manifesto”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Michael Snoyman's personal homepage and blog, featuring writing about programming, open source, health, finance, religion, and whatever else catches his interest.
Most-linked posts?
- Boring Haskell Manifesto5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-11-21
- Introducing the Rust crash course4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-10-18
- What Makes Haskell Unique3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-12-17
- Haskell: The Bad Parts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-28
- Haskell: The Bad Parts2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-21
- Haskell: The Bad Parts, part 32 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-09
- Haskell Success Stories2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-24
- Open Letter to XSLT Fans2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-04-07
- Boring Haskell Manifesto (2019)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-12-09
- My Best and Worst Deadlock in Rust2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-19
What Hacker News says?
Link for those interested: https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2018/10/introducing-rust-crash-...
Comment linking /blog/2018/10/introducing-rust-crash-course
on “A half-hour to learn Rust”Submitted Haskell: The Bad Parts, part 2 (2020) as a story · 258 points
HN discussionWow, this thread really exploded! My 2 cents on Haskell, since we're building https://wasp-lang.dev/ in it and also just hired several founding engineers: - we're sticking with the "Boring Haskell" manifesto( https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifest... ) - using only the widely adopted compiler plugins and not going too crazy with the monad transformer stack, which keeps the code easy for others…
Comment linking /blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifesto/
on “I would like a job writing Haskell”Submitted Rust RAII is better than the Haskell bracket pattern as a story · 238 points
HN discussionThis comment misses the point of the article, which argues against a urban legend that Haskell is too difficult "unless you are this tall" (a Phd, an E.T., a superhuman). I also had a shot at explaining why people are already tall enough in a past short "comic strip" [0]. I think the article makes a good job re-assuring the urban legends are a myth. Now. there are many reasons why one would want to use Haskell. For…
Comment linking /blog/2017/12/what-makes-haskell-unique
on “Learning Haskell is no harder than learning any other programming language”Submitted How to get an open source community to be interested in helping you as a story · 140 points
HN discussionIt's definitely possible to write "boring Haskell". getting fancy is more of a cultural tendency than a necessity when building things with Haskell. https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifest...
Comment linking /blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifesto
on “What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell”Submitted Haskell's Missing Concurrency Basics (2016) as a story · 114 points
HN discussionFrom the example you gave, it seems like we're talking past each other. The systems I write also have to deal with JSON with nullable fields, and with fields I ignore while parsing. Aeson for instance gives you complete control over how strict or lenient you wish to be when trying to parse data. The idea I was trying to convey was that if you care about marshalling data into types a la Haskell, then you can code les…
Comment linking /blog/2017/05/playing-with-lens-aeson
on “What Is Good About Haskell?”Submitted Open Letter to XSLT Fans as a story · 107 points
HN discussionDefinitely check out the part one of "Haskell: The Bad Parts" which is more relevant to the beginner to average Haskeller: https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2020/10/haskell-bad-parts-1/
Comment linking /blog/2020/10/haskell-bad-parts-1/
on “Haskell: The Bad Parts, part 2 (2020)”Submitted Stack(age): History, philosophy, and future as a story · 30 points
HN discussiontl;dr - Try rust. The mechanic point of this article is pretty clear: - it's possible to be unsafe in both Haskell and Rust when dealing with resource cleanup - Rust does a bit of a better job in the general case though it has it's own warts (see the other comments, it's hard to deal with issues during `drop`-triggered cleanup) I want to make a muddier meta point -- Rust is the best systems language to date (does an…
Comment linking /
on “Rust RAII is better than the Haskell bracket pattern”Submitted Why I lift as a story · 11 points
HN discussionIt's a great language to learn as a gateway for language design, but I think what turns people off are unrealistic expectations. Haskell has warts, as do all languages. Something that's tedious in one language might be a breeze in another. In Haskell, most of the baggage I've seen is around - Cabal: seems the best advice is to just start with Stack - Delayed exceptions: due to lazy evaluation (which is a really grea…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Why Learn Haskell? (2018)”Submitted Hello Nostr as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI highly, highly recommend this crash course from Michael Snoyman: https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2018/10/introducing-rust-crash-...
Comment linking /blog/2018/10/introducing-rust-crash-course
on “Rust Lang in a nutshell”Submitted Haskell: The Bad Parts, part 3 as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThere are quite a number of realistic folks who want to use Haskell because of the simplicity of its basic feature set. See, for example * https://www.simplehaskell.org/ * https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifest...
Comment linking /blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifesto
on “Monads and GATs in Nightly Rust”Submitted Boring Haskell Manifesto as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSince it is the hot topic of the day, let me add this perspective: http://www.snoyman.com/blog/2012/04/xslt-rant.html Quote > I'm not even talking about the hideously verbose syntax, or the completely obtuse data model. The fact that you can't know what any single line of code does without reviewing every other line in the program makes this language an abomination.
Comment linking /blog/2012/04/xslt-rant.html
on “XSLT is a failure wrapped in pain”Submitted Haskell base proposal, part 2: unifying vector-like types as a story · 5 points
HN discussionPrevious discussion on the Foundation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24988454 Also relevant if you read through those comments, and the discussion they include on FP Complete's involvement, is Michael Snoyman's more recent statement: https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2020/12/haskell-foundation I think Snoyman makes a few good points - namely, it remains to be seen exactly what the Foundation can and will do, and w…
Comment linking /blog/2020/12/haskell-foundation
on “New Haskell Foundation to Foster Haskell Adoption, Raises 200k USD”Submitted Haskell: The Bad Parts as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> Makes me wonder how much of a programming language can be hotswappable. For a research language that can make a lot of sense, not so much for a language to be used in industry. The downside is that different libraries will have different string representations, so you can end up being forced to do a lot of conversion if you're using different libraries that have made different choices from each other, or from your…
Comment linking /blog/2016/12/beware-of-readfile/
on “So Long Surrogates: How We Moved to UTF-8 in Haskell”Submitted Boring Haskell Manifesto as a story · 5 points
HN discussionhttps://www.snoyman.com/blog/2018/11/rust-crash-course-05-ru...
Comment linking /blog/2018/11/rust-crash-course-05-rule-of-three
on “Why Rust closures are somewhat hard”Submitted Haskell.org and the Evil Cabal as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYou might find this series interesting https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2020/10/haskell-bad-parts-1/ https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2020/11/haskell-bad-parts-2/ https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2020/12/haskell-bad-parts-3/
Comment linking /blog/2020/12/haskell-bad-parts-3/
on “Haskell for the Elm Enthusiast”Submitted My Best and Worst Deadlock in Rust as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
