teodorlu (u/teodorlu)

teodorlu commented on What makes you senior terriblesoftware.org/2025... · Posted by u/mooreds

teodorlu · 3 months ago

I prefer «reduces uncertainty» to «reduces ambiguity». The problem isn't ambiguous specifications, it's simply that there are too many unknowns to just do the work at this point.

The author talks about the shaping of the work, so I guess this is implicit.

teodorlu commented on Experts have it easy (2024) boydkane.com/essays/exper... · Posted by u/veqq

beyarkay · 10 months ago

(author here) Apologies, I've (maybe mistakenly) put dead links for various essays that are works-in-progress, in order to figure out what to prioritize. I know it's annoying, but it does give me very good signal about what people want to read. For example, 2% of people clicked the essay `/hard`, but only 1% of people have clicked on the essay for `/expert_aesthetics`. So I'm frantically trying to finish `/hard` before a streamer reads the main essay tomorrow.

If I can ask for constructive critique, how annoyed are you? The metrics are really useful to me, but I don't want to be an arsehole <3

teodorlu · 10 months ago

Not annoyed. But curious!

I agree that mentoring is hard, and I want to read your take.

I wonder if we agree on expert aesthetics or not. You write:

> Experts tend to have an aesthetic preference towards technically challenging work rather than simple-but-interesting work, and I’ve written more about this phenomenon here: expert aesthetics.

When I read the passage the first time, I thought you meant "experts prefer to work on hard problems in order to arrive at simple solutions". But that's not what you're saying!

teodorlu commented on Experts have it easy (2024) boydkane.com/essays/exper... · Posted by u/veqq

teodorlu · 10 months ago

Any idea where to find the "Hard" and "Expert aesthetics" articles mentioned in the article?

The links are giving me 404s.

https://boydkane.com/hard https://boydkane.com/expert_aesthetics

teodorlu commented on Why I ever wrote Clojure thesoftwarephilosopher.co... · Posted by u/sbjs

Shoop · 10 months ago

> I suspect this is the real reason Clojure was created, I bet Rich was just really bored.

Rich has written about the history and motivation behind Clojure here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321

teodorlu · 10 months ago

History of Clojure is also available in video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nD-QHbRWcoM

teodorlu commented on Premature Abstraction arendjr.nl/blog/2024/07/p... · Posted by u/arendjr

scotty79 · 2 years ago

I would love a language that has this gradual evolutional abstracting as a core concern. That makes it easy. Where you can start from simplest imperative code and easily abstract it as the need for this arises.

For example a language that requires "this." or "self." prefix is not such language because you can't easily turn a script or a function into a method of some object.

teodorlu · 2 years ago

> I would love a language that has this gradual evolutional abstracting as a core concern. That makes it easy. Where you can start from simplest imperative code and easily abstract it as the need for this arises.

This is about how I write Clojure.

I start out with some code that does the thing I want. Either effectfull code that "does the thing" or functions from data to data.

After a while, I feel like I'm missing a domain operation or two. At that point I've got an idea about what kind of abstraction I'm missing.

Rafael Dittwald describes the process of looking for domain operations and domain entities nicely here:

https://youtu.be/vK1DazRK_a0

teodorlu commented on The Art of Unix Programming (2003) catb.org/esr/writings/tao... · Posted by u/wallflower

wlindley · 2 years ago

Hey Eric if you're out there, a 20-years-later edition, looking at a few new programs, formats, and protocols would be grand; as would your comments on which of your statements and predictions have held up best and worst over the decades.

teodorlu · 2 years ago

Consider sending him an E-mail, he responded when I thanked him for exactly this book a few years ago! There's an "E-mail me" link on the left sidebar at http://www.catb.org/~esr/.

teodorlu commented on Fourteen Years of Go go.dev/blog/14years... · Posted by u/keyle

mseepgood · 2 years ago

> They have very deliberately tried to minimise the feature set

I thought this was common knowledge. They made whole conference talks about it.

teodorlu · 2 years ago

Might I ask for a link?

I searched around, but didn't find anything. Perhaps the title is something different than "go minimal feature set".

teodorlu commented on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? · Posted by u/revskill

teodorlu · 3 years ago

https://play.teod.eu/

Though I'd rather call it a personal memex than a personal blog!

teodorlu commented on Writing summaries is more important than reading more books andreasfragner.com/writin... · Posted by u/42point2

221qqwe · 3 years ago

IMHO realistically for most people the ratio between "your own ideas" and everything else should be like 5% or so. If you're exceptionally gifted maybe up to 20%.. (unless you're writing fiction)

teodorlu · 3 years ago

If you mash together two ideas, is the new composite idea yours?

I'd say it's yours. In that frame, there are lots of ideas.

Lets assume there are 10 000 known ideas. Then there's 10^8 combinations of two ideas, and 10^12 combinations of three ideas. That's a lot of ideas, even for the internet! I bet not all of them are named. And different people are going to frame ideas differently.

I also believe trying to form your ideas in reference to existing knowledge is a great way to learn existing knowledge.