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Winestock Webdesign
Personal blog · winestockwebdesign.comprogrammingphilosophy
Winestock Webdesign is a personal blog at winestockwebdesign.com about programming and philosophy. Since 2011, 74 different Hacker News readers have linked it 110 times, most often “The Lisp Curse”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
This is the homepage of Winestock Webdesign.
Most-linked posts?
- The Lisp Curse38 people · 47 mentions · first linked 2011-04-15
- The Lisp Curse (2011)19 people · 26 mentions · first linked 2012-08-28
- The Eternal Mainframe (2013)15 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2013-05-31
- /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-10
- The Eternal Mainframe (2013)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-05
What Hacker News says?
I was thinking of The Lisp Curse[1] while reading your comment and then you mentioned the language! I’m quite excited by Zig (even if safety is lower priority for it than for Rust, it is really pushing the tooling envelope) but I do wonder whether the “anti-composition hypothesis” here holds up for relevant projects today. Many C programs include shims for compatibility between multiple different “library object mod…
Comment linking /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
on “Why I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig: consistency, mastery, and fun”Submitted The Lisp Curse as a story · 268 points
HN discussion"The Eternal Mainframe" http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...
Comment linking /Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html
on “Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money”Submitted The Lisp Curse (2011) as a story · 194 points
HN discussionHere's my site: http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/ It used to be in AngularJS, now it's vanilla HTML & CSS. Mostly typography with just a little bit of animation.
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on “Building a Kickass Portfolio”Submitted The Lisp Curse as a story · 136 points
HN discussionI'm not referencing the market share. I'm referring to Lisp Curse. http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html In summary: Because Lisp was easy to fork, any time two nerds disagreed it was forked. And because they weren't working on same database you got Lisps with patchworks of functionality/bugs that each on their own couldn't compare to more or less monolith language like C/C++ or Java. Same dynamic…
Comment linking /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
on “Despite best efforts .NET is still not an open platform”Submitted The Eternal Mainframe (2013) as a story · 128 points
HN discussionThis is pretty much exactly the argument made by The Lisp Curse: http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html That basically every program written in a Lisp becomes its own programming language. It has mechanisms which are vaguely-familiar-but-different from all the other programs. The mechanisms are 80% of a complete solution, but a different 80% each time, depending on the needs of the program.
Comment linking /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
on “Languages Which Almost Became CSS”Submitted The Lisp Curse (2011) as a story · 86 points
HN discussionPerl lost popularity when people were using windows, learnt programming with java, were scared by unix idioms, implicity, regexps, contexts and concepts like anonymous blocks you can map/filter with. nowadays everyone finally think those features are cool (maybe even C23 will have lambdas) so perl wouldn't have lost popularity. I'm still waiting for 1 other interpreted language to have something as convenient as the…
Comment linking /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
on “Cppfront, Herb Sutter's proposal for a new C++ syntax”Submitted The Eternal Mainframe (2013) as a story · 78 points
HN discussionIt’s the Lisp Curse: http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html “ Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp. ”
Comment linking /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
on “John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language”Submitted The Lisp Curse (2017) as a story · 64 points
HN discussion> You mold your Emacs to a workflow unique to you, notice things you are doing often, add elisp functions to change it to make those things easier, and carry them with you from job to job. I'm using emacs for 15 years, and it doesn't work for me. When I noticed things I'm doing often, I already have a habit of doing these things by this way. So if I wrote an elisp-function to automate things, I wouldn't use it, beca…
Comment linking /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
on “Making Emacs Popular Again”Submitted The Lisp Curse (2011) as a story · 59 points
HN discussionThe Eternal Mainframe in the sky. With diamonds. http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h...
Comment linking /Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html
on “MongoDB queries don’t always return all matching documents”Submitted The Eternal Mainframe (2013) as a story · 55 points
HN discussionNot surprising. Lisp Curse has its own way of creeping in, but then again I'd take this any day over cubicle-farm software that is so sterile and stuck up that you need a 2 week long tutorial in order to run anything (I'm looking at you Google with your fancy-schmancy Borg and other inscrutable infra). http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
Comment linking /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
on “Python overtakes Java to become the second-most popular programming language”Submitted The Lisp Curse (2011) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYor sentiment is beautifully captured in the essay "The Eternal Mainframe" [1] by Rudolf Winestock. It gets reposted every year or so here on HN. [1] http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h... (2013)
Comment linking /Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html
on “Ask HN: Does anyone else find the AWS Lambda developer experience frustrating?”Submitted The Eternal Mainframe (2013) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYour Law of a Decent Runtime reminds me exactly of the "Lisp Curse": http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
Comment linking /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
on “Modern Java – A Guide to Java 8”Submitted The Eternal Mainframe (2013) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSo we finally reaching the point where batch and interactive jobs are clearly separated because the very different tradeoffs they need. http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.h... indeed.
Comment linking /Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html
on “Go’s march to low-latency GC”Submitted The Eternal Mainframe as a story · 2 points
HN discussionContinued: Churn is further compounded by the Lisp Curse; an individual hacker can scratch his itch in Javascript all by himself and then stick it on github, the other three 1995 langs (Java/Ruby/Python) never quite reached this level of empowerment of individuals. That's great but also means an explosion of activity from smart inexperienced hackers who don't quite have a full understanding of the problem they are t…
Comment linking /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
on “Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?”Submitted The eternal mainframe as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe best answer I've seen is the Lisp Curse. It's basically the idea that Lisp is so flexible that every project becomes its own DSL / idiomatic version of Lisp. Imagine what's being discussed here, except that every programmer actually has the power to just make the change rather than have to submit it to the central Rust team for consideration and eventual implementation. http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_…
Comment linking /Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
on “I can't keep up with idiomatic Rust”Submitted The Lisp Curse as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
