Top all-time · #11075
Stephen Ramsay
Personal blog · stephenramsay.net · on HN as sramsayprogrammingwriting
Stephen Ramsay's personal blog at stephenramsay.net covers programming and writing. Since 2023, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters describe the author as a Professor of English who teaches programming to humanities students and works in digital humanities, using computation to support historical and rhetorical arguments.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-09
- The Unreasonable Effectiveness of AWK2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-16
- /about/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-09
What Hacker News says?
The world of the Digital Humanities is a lot of fun (and one I've been a part of, teaching programming to Historians and Philosophers of Science!) It uses computation to provide new types of evidence for historical or rhetorical arguments and data-driven critiques. There's an art to it as well, showing evidence for things like multiple interpretations of a text through the stochasticity of various text extraction mo…
Comment linking /about/
on “If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?”Submitted If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C? as a story · 632 points
HN discussion> Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive. As a Professor of English who teaches programming to humanities students, the writer has had an extremely interesting and unusual academic career [1]. He sounds awesome, but I think it's fair to suggest he may not have much experience of large scale commercial software deve…
Comment linking /about/
on “If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?”Submitted The Unreasonable Effectiveness of AWK as a story · 6 points
HN discussionGrowing in absolute numbers doesn't mean growing the market share, and even a growing market share is not necessarily sufficiently fast growth to become a safe bet. All languages that ended up becoming very popular grew their market share much faster than Rust does. Being an old language with some real market share is obviously better than being an old language with negligible market share, but being an old language…
Comment linking /posts/vibe-coding.html
on “Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed”Submitted Beautiful Documents with Groff (Part I) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionGreybeard here. Just blogged about this very topic a couple of weeks ago: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Awk” https://stephenramsay.net/posts/unreasonable-awk.html
Comment linking /posts/unreasonable-awk.html
on “Awk: Power and Promise of a 40 yr old language (2021)”