Top all-time · #5307
Tom Stuart
Personal blog · tomstu.art · on HN as tomstuartprogrammingwriting
Tom Stuart's personal blog at tomstu.art covers programming and writing. Since 2021, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “The DHH Problem (2014)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tom Stuart's blog for hands-on explainers of programming ideas, such as lambda calculus built from nothing, microKanren in Ruby, automatic differentiation and Futamura projections. They also link his talk on DHH.
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.
Most-linked posts?
- The DHH Problem (2014)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-09-23
- Programming with Nothing4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-02-28
- Automatic Differentiation in Ruby (2016)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-08-01
- Compilers for Free (2013)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-23
- Hello, Declarative World2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-03-17
- Programming with Something2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-11
What Hacker News says?
Tom Stuart gave a really good lightning talk about this a decade ago, which is very respectful and has aged well https://tomstu.art/the-dhh-problem It's not just about his politics. DHH is reactionary, mean, dismissive of others' opinions. He acts more like a high school bully than a leader. Since then, DHH has gone off the deep end with xenophobic, racist, and transphobic comments. I was drawn to the Ruby community…
Comment linking /the-dhh-problem
on “Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover”Submitted Programming with Nothing as a story · 120 points
HN discussionIf you’re starting from zero this old classic could serve as an appetiser: https://tomstu.art/programming-with-nothing
Comment linking /programming-with-nothing
on “Lambda Calculus in 400 Bytes”Submitted Programming with Something as a story · 62 points
HN discussionhttps://tomstu.art/the-dhh-problem
Comment linking /the-dhh-problem
on “Gem.coop”Submitted The DHH Problem (2014) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionA while ago I stumbled across this post: https://tomstu.art/hello-declarative-world It walks you through implementing microkanren in Ruby. You might find it easier to implement all of that in gdscript.
Comment linking /hello-declarative-world
on “What Is miniKanren?”Submitted Automatic Differentiation in Ruby (2016) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou may also enjoy https://tomstu.art/automatic-differentiation-in-ruby and the accompanying video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI7mtWB4WiA .
Comment linking /automatic-differentiation-in-ruby
on “Differentiable programming from scratch”Submitted Compilers for Free (2013) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://tomstu.art/programming-with-nothing This is also a fun introduction to building up lambda calculus. And it gets up to fizzbuzz!
Comment linking /programming-with-nothing
on “Needed 1+1, built a functional programming language”Submitted Hello, Declarative World as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGood intro into Futamura projections: https://tomstu.art/compilers-for-free
Comment linking /compilers-for-free
on “Staged Abstract Interpreters [pdf]”Submitted Compilers for Free (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionOh that's the omarchy guy. Yeah I would not touch anything he has created with a long stick unless there was feces upon the end of it. Ruby on Rails has needed new leadership for a long time. https://tomstu.art/the-dhh-problem
Comment linking /the-dhh-problem
on “Ripping Off the Hey.com Band-Aid”Submitted Programming with Something as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf anyone’s interested, I wrote up an example application of dual numbers in Ruby: https://tomstu.art/automatic-differentiation-in-ruby
Comment linking /automatic-differentiation-in-ruby
on “Why don't we define “imaginary” numbers for every “impossibility”? (2012)”One of my all time favorites: https://tomstu.art/programming-with-nothing
Comment linking /programming-with-nothing
on “It’s Lambdas All the Way Down”
