Top all-time · #4256
The Craft of Coding
Personal blog · craftofcoding.wordpress.comprogramming
The Craft of Coding is a personal blog at craftofcoding.wordpress.com about programming. Since 2019, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 41 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for posts on early programming history: IBM 7090 punch cards, Algol 60 and 68, recursion, Fortran, Ada, and pre-Fortran languages. Comments cite it as a source or background without judging its quality.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Musings on programming and education
What Hacker News says?
Was curious how a statement was converted to punches. Found this. https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/read-your-own... Imagine only programming with 64 CHARACTERS :)
Comment linking /2017/01/28/read-your-own-punch-cards/
on “Say it's 1962, you're lucky enough to be a programmer working with an IBM 7090”Submitted Fortran is easy to learn as a story · 100 points
HN discussionThat reminds me of this program, which calculates the month and day given the year and the day of the year [0]. There's a version that abuses goto, and one that stores state in variables and only uses structured statements. You probably won't see people similarly abuse goto today, though. I think it was translated from Fortran. [0]: https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2020/02/12/the-world-of-...
Comment linking /2020/02/12/the-world-of-unstructured-programming-i-e-spaghetti-code/
on “Big Ball of Mud (1999)”Submitted Algol-68 seemed like a good idea as a story · 82 points
HN discussionDepends on your needs. Sometimes you just need a hammer. Michael Wirth had a few comments about Julia recently: https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2022/03/14/why-i-have-gi...
Comment linking /2022/03/14/why-i-have-given-up-on-julia/
on “The State of Fortran”Submitted What Fortran does better than C-like languages as a story · 76 points
HN discussionSome biting critiques from Edsger Dijkstra: Red: “the proposal is both advanced and backward in such an incongruous manner that I am baffled” Green: “technical incompetence, probably enhanced by dishonesty” Blue: “the blue language is unacceptably complex” … “these documents are an inextricable mixture of technical documentation and salestalk” Yellow: “an unsalvageable mess” https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2014/…
Comment linking /2014/04/16/dijkstra-on-ada/
on “Overview of the Ada Computer Language Competition (1979)”Submitted Languages Pre-Fortran as a story · 71 points
HN discussionI've just looked at this snippet, which the blog used back in 2017 to illustrate that Algol 68 was "utter madness": https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/a-brief-look-... COMMENT Algol 68 program to calculate the Sieve of Eratosthenes for some upper limit N COMMENT PROC eratosthenes = (INT n) []INT: ( [n]INT sieve; FOR i TO UPB sieve DO sieve[i] := i OD; INT k = ENTIER sqrt(n); sieve[1] := 0; FOR i FROM 2 T…
Comment linking /2021/04/06/algorithm-35-the-sieve-in-algol-68/
on “Algol-68 seemed like a good idea”Submitted Dijkstra on Ada as a story · 65 points
HN discussionOne feature, as far as I can tell, that no languages had until Algol-60 was recursion ( https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/recursion-the... ). It's hard to imagine nowadays how controversial this was. Previous versions of Algol did not necessarily require any form of dynamic memory allocation. Recursion requires it in some form to avoid overwriting a procedure's variables upon the recursive call. Languag…
Comment linking /2022/10/20/d%c8%b3kstra-on-the-difficulty-of-recursion/
on “Languages Pre-Fortran”Submitted Forget about teaching kids to code as a story · 54 points
HN discussionHas anyone found the source for that tablet? All I have found is this: >Note that quite a few descriptions on Babylonian tablets seem to cite a translation of a Pythagorean algorithm from a ca. 1900BC tablet by a Dennis Ramsey – I have not been able to find the original source of this anywhere.[0] The linked arctile cites wikipedia and bible-history.com. This book[1] misquotes the supposed tablet as being ycb 7289,…
Comment linking /author/spqr/
on “Pythagorean Theorem Found on Clay Tablet 1k Years Older Than Pythagoras”Submitted Coding in Ada: Strings (IV) Unbounded to String as a story · 34 points
HN discussionHere's one possibility... https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2020/05/28/fibonacci-and...
Comment linking /2020/05/28/fibonacci-and-pineapples/
on “Ask HN: What's the relevance of "This is a pleasant pineapple"?”Submitted In C, memory management begins – The Craft of Coding as a story · 10 points
HN discussionI've always considered Fortran to be the "first", but with some quick research, it looks like Algol was the first C-like lang to add an if/then statement. My guess is that the author was trying to approximate modern imperative programming. [1] https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2021/01/11/why-algol-bes...
Comment linking /2021/01/11/why-algol-bested-fortran-for-a-bit/
on “The seven programming ur-languages (2021)”Submitted Is this the weirdest thing in C? as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Timeline of Fortran as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why Star Wars tech was often so secure – The Craft of Coding as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why is so much modern software garbage? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted In C some things aren't what they seem – The Craft of Coding as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted In C some things aren't what they seem as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Niklaus Wirth on Programming in 1968 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Musings from an almost-retired prof – The Craft of Coding as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why slow computing was a better learning experience as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Coding COBOL: Tricks with arrays (or tables) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The caveats of Julia for image processing (ii) – the image structure as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted C++ vs. Ada in Safety Critical Software as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why mediocre CS grads may have a harder time getting a good job in the future as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
