Hacker News: EdwardCoffin

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Dr. Dobb's Developer Library DVD 6 (2010)"

EdwardCoffin — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:10:34 +0000

I think it was C+@ (pronounced CAT, as I recall).

Edit: pasting a comment of mine from here in 2019 [1]:

The language is C+@ [2]. I dug up an article about it in Dr. Dobbs Journal, the October 1993 issue. This does not seem to be the article I am remembering, since it does not go into the instruction interleaving technique anywhere near as much as I remember, but they do mention it and say it was called "beading":

The binaries produced by the C+@ compiler are independent of the underlying machine architecture. Without recompiling, applications can be moved from SPARC to 68000 to Intel x86, and so on. C+@ is not interpretive--the binaries are encoded using a sophisticated 'beading' technique developed at Bell Labs. Because of the streamlined language design, the C+@ compiler produces these portable binaries with extraordinary speed, without the need for preprocessing or front ends.

This is from the article's introduction:

The C+@ programming language, an object-oriented language derived from AT&T Bell Lab's Calico programming language, was developed to provide programmers with a true object-based language and development environment. C+@ (pronounced "cat") has the syntax of C and the power of Smalltalk. Unlike C++, C+@ includes a mature class library with more than 350 classes used throughout the system. The C+@ compiler itself is written in C+@, and all of the source for the class libraries is included with development systems. The Calico project was started at AT&T Bell Labs in the early '80s, after the introduction of Smalltalk and at the same time as C++. Calico was originally used for rapid prototyping of telecommunication services; hence, its heavy emphasis on keeping the language syntax simple and showcasing the power of the graphical development environment.*

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583430

[2] https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/C%2b%40

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Molly guard in reverse"

EdwardCoffin — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 11:37:13 +0000

I use one much like this four or five times a day, and have none of the problems described. I fill it through the spout though, so never have to remove the lid.

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)"

EdwardCoffin — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:22:25 +0000

This makes me think of Bane's rule, described in this comment here [1]:

Bane's rule, you don't understand a distributed computing problem until you can get it to fit on a single machine first.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Two ways to crack a walnut, per Grothendieck (2025)"

EdwardCoffin — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:38:50 +0000

Though I was confident this was just a metaphor, I did try cracking a walnut using this method. I submerged three walnuts in a jar with some tap water, and let them sit for three years before trying to open them.

It was a let-down: they were easier to open, but certainly not by hand, I still had to use a nutcracker. They smelled bad, too. I did not try eating them.

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "What to Do When the Trisector Comes (1983) [pdf]"

EdwardCoffin — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:41:42 +0000

In the same vein is the talk Pathological Physics: Tales from 'The Box' [1] which talks about various physics papers written by amateurs and sent in to the physics department at the university the speaker was in.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXSgp755DSA

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z"

EdwardCoffin — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 13:23:09 +0000

Even if that's the intended meaning of literally, it is still a reckless exaggeration. I'm pretty sure that Stephenson's endings are no more abrupt than some of Shakespeare's (check out Hamlet and Macbeth) or some of Frank Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune), and I never hear anyone go out of their way to describe either of them as being unable to write endings.

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "The lost cause of the Lisp machines"

EdwardCoffin — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 13:39:25 +0000

>> ‘It was the development environment’

> No, it wasn’t.

I kind of think it was. The best argument I think is embodied in Kent Pitman's comments in this usenet thread [1] where he argues that for the Lisp Machine romantics (at least the subset that include him) what they are really referring to is the total integration of the software, and he gives some pretty good examples of the benefits they bring. He freely admits there's not any reason why the experience could not be reproduced on other systems, it's that it hasn't been that is the problem.

I found his two specific examples particularly interesting. Search for

    * Tags Multiple Query Replace From Buffer

and

    * Source Compare

which are how he introduced them. He also describes "One of the most common ways to get a foothold in Genera for debugging" which I find pretty appealing, and still not available in any modern systems.

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/XpvUwF2xKbk/m/X...

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Emoji evidence errors don’t undo a murder conviction"

EdwardCoffin — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:46:41 +0000

In the same vein was an incident where an improperly localized phone in Turkey caused a sent message to arrive with different characters, with very different meaning, and the fallout was two deaths [1], discussed here [2]

[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Designing a Language (2017)"

EdwardCoffin — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 14:57:02 +0000

In a similar vein is this 2003 post in an MIT discussion forum by Scott McKay [1].

I'd also highly recommend that anyone interested in this kind of thing listen to all three of the Dynamic Languages Wizards Series panels from 2001: runtime [2], language design [3], and compilation [4]

Note that though these are videos, there isn't that much compelling in the visual portion, you could easily rip them to audio files and lose little.

[1] https://libarynth.org/fifty_questions_for_a_prospective_lang...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LG-RtcSYUQ

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agw-wlHGi0E

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at7viw2KXak

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Design of the SCHEME-78 Lisp-based microprocessor (1980)"

EdwardCoffin — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:20:51 +0000

I know that Guy Steele joined Thinking Machines, but after they'd at least designed the CM-1. He talked a little about it in A Conversation with Guy Steele Jr. in the April 2005 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. I don't have a link, but I am sure he has talked about it elsewhere too.

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "The Culture novels as a dystopia"

EdwardCoffin — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:32:53 +0000

You're probably referring to A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Iain M Banks [1]

[1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "The Culture novels as a dystopia"

EdwardCoffin — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 14:38:17 +0000

This is not the first time I've read articles attempting to paint the Culture as a dystopia. I think the best counter is to quote the author's own words, describing how he felt about it, from an interview he did with CNN [1]:

CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture [the society he has created]?

Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it's my secular heaven ... Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven't done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It's mine, I thought of it, and I'm going home with it -- absolutely, it's great.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/15/iain.banks/ind...

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Is OOXML Artifically Complex?"

EdwardCoffin — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:33:00 +0000

If caches have a place in a file storage format, they should at least be optional and separate from mandatory content, and I got the impression from the critique that they were neither.

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Is OOXML Artifically Complex?"

EdwardCoffin — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 13:55:54 +0000

I think the point of the criticism I read was that the edit should have worked. There is no reason why the opaque mess following what was obviously a definition of the contents of the spreadsheet should even be there let alone be dependent on the original contents of the cells.

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Is OOXML Artifically Complex?"

EdwardCoffin — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 13:27:12 +0000

I remember reading an early criticism of the spreadsheet side of OOXML, where a simple spreadsheet with three cells was created: A1 containing '1', B1 containing '2', and C1 containing the formula A1+B1. That spreadsheet was saved, the file opened in an editor which showed the values of the cells, and A1 changed to something else, say 3. This broke the spreadsheet, as there were all sorts of knock-on effects contained in the virtually opaque mess that followed the cell contents.

I've probably got the details wrong, but that was the gist of it. I'd love to rediscover the analysis, but my searches have not yielded it.

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction"

EdwardCoffin — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 15:04:17 +0000

If there were another writer of non-fiction as deeply researched I'd compare McPhee to, it would be Robert Caro. I already knew from Caro's memoir Working that Caro did not use a tape recorder in his interviews with subjects, and from this article about McPhee's method, I learned that McPhee does not either. I'm a bit surprised: I'd have thought for such deep research one would want a recording to refer back to, but both seem to feel that the drawbacks of influencing their subjects outweigh their benefit.

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Developer's block"

EdwardCoffin — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 11:39:15 +0000

The Oxide and Friends podcast [1] did a whole episode on this: Coder's Block (25 Oct 2021) [2].

It had some good stuff in it, the best of which (for me) was: when stuck, write debugging infrastructure.

[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm

[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/coders-bloc...

Edit: punctuation

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "How randomness improves algorithms (2023)"

EdwardCoffin — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 13:01:28 +0000

It's unmentioned in the article, but Trevor Blackwell's PhD thesis, Applications of Randomness in System Performance Measurement [1] was advocating this in 1998:

This thesis presents and analyzes a simple principle for building systems: that there should be a random component in all arbitrary decisions. If no randomness is used, system performance can vary widely and unpredictably due to small changes in the system workload or configuration. This makes measurements hard to reproduce and less meaningful as predictors of performance that could be expected in similar situations.

[1] https://tlb.org/docs/thesis.pdf

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "The value of institutional memory"

EdwardCoffin — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:45:56 +0000

This reminded me of Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011) [1] which has been most recently discussed here, here [2].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111228105122/http://wrttn.in/0...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42235452

New comment by EdwardCoffin in "Reading Neuromancer for the first time in 2025"

EdwardCoffin — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 21:28:03 +0000

Thanks, I'd not seen that particular article before, and it has some things in there I'd not read in any of his other interviews.

I think the article I got his take on Blade Runner from was the Paris Review [1] which is archived here [2]

[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...

[2] https://archive.is/qmwKj