Hacker News: jneen

How to Make Programming Terrible for Everyone

jneen — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:35:26 +0000

Article URL: https://jneen.ca/posts/2026-03-27-how-to-make-programming-terrible-for-everyone/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47547913

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by jneen in "AI and the Ship of Theseus"

jneen — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:53:09 +0000

I mean, it has to be asked... was the source of chardet not in the training set...?

New comment by jneen in "Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?"

jneen — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 06:03:20 +0000

I've had my job offshored in the past, in case a personal anecdote is relevant here.

New comment by jneen in "Tulip – An untyped functional language"

jneen — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 05:06:36 +0000

Yeah, it's basically a toolkit for building jitted languages. Basically the easiest way to get a tracing jit these days. So it'll be a self-hosting jit similar to pypy or pixie.

New comment by jneen in "Tulip – An untyped functional language"

jneen — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 02:41:31 +0000

Yeah, it was a difficult decision to remove types - I'd gotten myself into a corner trying to tack on dependent types, and it just wasn't happening. My bet is that unlike most of the un{i,}typed languages out there (most of which I'd categorize as lisps and smalltalks), tulip provides tagging and destructuring that allows the programmer to maintain some level of control over the polymorphism. Tulip will panic at runtime for non-total functions, but ideally you'll have the tools necessary to keep the panic as close to the problem as possible.

New comment by jneen in "Tulip – An untyped functional language"

jneen — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 02:33:02 +0000

um, it's a flower

New comment by jneen in "Tulip – An untyped functional language"

jneen — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 00:18:06 +0000

Exactly! This is what the @method / @impl system is for - it's about equivalent to clojure's defprotocol. Future plans include named protocols consisting of multiple methods, and protocol-based matching.

New comment by jneen in "Tulip – An untyped functional language"

jneen — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 20:36:39 +0000

Argh, thanks for the cache link. I'm still on heroku free-tier :\

New comment by jneen in "Tulip – An untyped functional language"

jneen — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 20:36:04 +0000

Yep, it's my opinion, and that's why I put it into the design. Lots of language design comes from opinions. I hope it's borne out. FWIW it's the same approach Rust has taken, where macros have to end with a ! to make them visually distinct.

New comment by jneen in "Tulip – An untyped functional language"

jneen — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 20:34:45 +0000

Yep! It focuses more on dynamic type-checks than on static typing though, so I put it in the category of "untyped functional" - more like clojure and erlang than haskell or ml.

New comment by jneen in "Tulip – An untyped functional language"

jneen — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 20:33:52 +0000

It was a decision I made, partly because I realized they were right, and partly because I think tulips are pretty.

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Tulip – An untyped functional language

jneen — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 17:09:24 +0000

Article URL: http://www.jneen.net/posts/2015-03-01-tulip-language

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9277572

Points: 77

# Comments: 58

New comment by jneen in "A female computer science major at Stanford: “Floored” by the sexism"

jneen — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 01:25:03 +0000

See, I actually know it has to do with gender because I used to have a beard. I got treated very differently back then.

New comment by jneen in "A female computer science major at Stanford: “Floored” by the sexism"

jneen — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 21:05:03 +0000

As someone who has tried to document and report shitty behavior, it's important to keep in mind how risky that is.

Here are a few patterns I've observed:

pattern (a) MAN: does shitty thing; WOMAN: hey please stop; WOMAN's performance review: "has conflicts with MAN"

pattern (b) MAN: does shitty thing; WOMAN: reports shitty thing; MANAGER: oh MAN is a nice guy, why don't you try working it out yourself

pattern (c) MAN: does shitty thing; WOMAN: does nothing because she actually reports to MAN

New comment by jneen in "A female computer science major at Stanford: “Floored” by the sexism"

jneen — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 20:55:58 +0000

I have heard most of these things, and it sucks. This is hella real.

New comment by jneen in "Abusing Contributors is not OK"

jneen — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 21:54:39 +0000

If he is, it's pretty tame compared to the treatment of those who criticize him, and those who claim to support those who criticize him.

New comment by jneen in "Show HN: Untrusted, a JavaScript adventure game you play by modifying its source"

jneen — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 17:41:10 +0000

Content note: plays sound.

Did the quick ^W at work :|

New comment by jneen in "Neovim"

jneen — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 20:36:20 +0000

This is essentially where I'm going with ix. Vim with an awesome haskell-like language underneath whose syntax is optimized for doing powerful stuff in command mode.

A prototype is at https://github.com/jayferd/ixl-prototype

New comment by jneen in "The worst thing about CoffeeScript"

jneen — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:06:10 +0000

I don't know if this can be solved without a syntax change. As long as there is variable binding and variable mutation are conflated in the syntax, there's really no good way for the compiler to distinguish between the two. It's an unfortunate design decision that we may be stuck with if we want back-compat.

LiveScript is interesting, but seems to have Too Many Features for my tastes.

Paul Graham and the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker

jneen — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 18:04:44 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/p/ba8349e64e60

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6991831

Points: 3

# Comments: 1