Hacker News: wduquette

New comment by wduquette in "Towards a Theory of Bugs: The Ruliology of the Unexpected"

wduquette — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:10:24 +0000

At least not automatically. From an algorithmic standpoint it seems likely to be undecidable. But let us not look too closely at what was really a throwaway remark.

New comment by wduquette in "Towards a Theory of Bugs: The Ruliology of the Unexpected"

wduquette — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:08:54 +0000

Kurt Godel says that you are correct.

New comment by wduquette in "JEP 540: Simple JSON API (Now in Incubator)"

wduquette — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 21:10:06 +0000

A stated goal of the API is to have "low ceremony" when reading arbitrary JSON files. I agree the JSON creation API looks pretty clunky, but the parsing API looks fairly simple.

New comment by wduquette in "Faulty Towers, vibe sickness, and the vibe bobsled"

wduquette — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:44:47 +0000

And things I missed the first time through.

New comment by wduquette in "Primate Is the Last Great Web Framework"

wduquette — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:54:41 +0000

We used to call this “middleware”, that which sits between the client and the server.

New comment by wduquette in "Tacit Knowledge"

wduquette — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:04:33 +0000

Fascinating. When I was a kid and was having difficulty with some task, my grandfather would say, "You didn't hold your mouth right." Many years later, I realized that he was talking about tacit knowledge (and probably most specifically about one's embouchure when playing a wind instrument). There are vital aspects to most skills that are simply not evident to the casual observer.

I had not heard the phrase "tacit knowledge" until today; I'm glad to have a word for it.

New comment by wduquette in "Solid and Clean Code never felt solid or clean to me"

wduquette — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:18:12 +0000

Re: Java classes called "SimpleFoo": that's usually because `Foo` is an abstract class or interface, and `SimpleFoo` is the version you actually use most of the time, unless you absolutely have to implement a `MyReallyComplexFoo` for some specific purpose.

New comment by wduquette in "A retrospective of my time on the internet"

wduquette — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:09:21 +0000

I remember the golden age of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. I remember the golden age of Usenet. I remember the golden age of blogs. I remember the golden--well, silver--age of FaceBook and Twitter.

Things tarnish. New things pop up to replace them. I'm currently witnessing the tarnishing of Substack.

It was ever thus; so shall it be.

New comment by wduquette in "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)"

wduquette — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:16:57 +0000

And then, along with economic bubbles you also get moral panics. Seen a bunch of those in my time as well. It's a similar thing.

New comment by wduquette in "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)"

wduquette — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:55:26 +0000

Yes, but the term "Bubble" comes from the South Sea Bubble.

New comment by wduquette in "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)"

wduquette — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:07:11 +0000

Excellent book. The high point for me was the enterprising fellow who set up a stall in London during the South Sea Bubble (the original bubble!), allowing people to invest in "An undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." People lined up for a couple of days to give the fellow their money...after which the fellow disappeared, never to be seen again. No lies detected!

New comment by wduquette in "A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time (2022)"

wduquette — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 02:30:38 +0000

Yes, that’s what we had too. I loved that machine. What was the incantation? 104799L, or something like that?

New comment by wduquette in "Loreline – Tools for writing interactive fiction"

wduquette — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:25:16 +0000

Yes. It brings the experience of playing a text adventure to writing a text adventure.

New comment by wduquette in "Loreline – Tools for writing interactive fiction"

wduquette — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:24:27 +0000

I've spent time with various versions of Inform, and bounced off of Inform 7 fairly hard, for the same reasons that I bounced off of AppleScript years ago: it's a read-only language. Which is to say, the English phrases you use read well...but are hard to remember and hard to look up.

I'm sure it's possible to become highly fluent if you use it a lot, but I'd much prefer something that didn't use English prose for logic and control.

New comment by wduquette in "A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time (2022)"

wduquette — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:18:01 +0000

Heathkit sold an LSI-11 as a kit; my father built one in the mid-70's. I learned BASIC, a bit of Fortran, a bit of PDP-11 assembler, and Pascal on that machine. We started with paper type, and eventually moved up to dual 8" floppies. We started with 16K of memory, IIRC, and ended with 28K.

Been a programmer ever since, me.

New comment by wduquette in "WordPress 7.0"

wduquette — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:22:40 +0000

I've been a WordPress user for years. I don't want integrated AI. Sure hope I'll be able to ignore it.

New comment by wduquette in "The Mercury logic programming system"

wduquette — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:04:52 +0000

You say “dead”, I say “stable”. Not everyone wants to base their work on a moving target.

New comment by wduquette in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

wduquette — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:36:05 +0000

"You can! You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so, for the same reason that there aren’t many jobs out there for carpenters who refuse to use power tools."

I've long regarded myself as more a master craftsman than an engineer, and I've had the pleasure of working on one-of-a-kind or first-of-a-kind things. Perhaps fortunately I'm near retirement. But I genuinely enjoy the coding: it's how I engage with the problem and learn to understand it. It's also how I ensure that I'll be able to read the code and find things in the code base when I come back to it years later. Last thing I want to do is spend my days overseeing someone (or something) else's code. If I wanted to be a manager of programmers I could have done that years ago.

New comment by wduquette in "The Adventure Family Tree (2024)"

wduquette — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:29:08 +0000

Yes, the Volcano View. We planned to add a new area just past it, but as I say we ran out of memory.

I've no idea where the version we started with would fall in the family tree, but this would have been ~1979, and the OS was HT-11, Heathkit's version of RT-11 for their H11 computer kit. So far as I know there was nothing special about it, except that it had been ported to RT-11 on the PDP-11.

New comment by wduquette in "The Adventure Family Tree (2024)"

wduquette — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:48:03 +0000

We had a copy of the Fortran source for the PDP-11 when I was a teenager. My buddy and I managed to add a room: in the first room of the Maze of Twisty Little Passages All The Same, if you gave the command "out" (as one tried), you discovered that you were "Nowhere". "There is nothing in all directions." You could then enter "in" to go back to the Maze, or "get nothing" to add "nothing" to your inventory.

There was a place in another room where your way was blocked by lava; our plan was to let you drop the "nothing" on the lava, and proceed, but we had run out of memory. (28K max!)