Hacker News: wduquette

New comment by wduquette in "Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer"

wduquette — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:04:29 +0000

A craftsman differs from an artist in exactly this: an artist produces beauty while a craftsman produces an artifact that serves its purpose beautifully and robustly. The two can be combined, of course.

New comment by wduquette in "Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer"

wduquette — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:02:06 +0000

Agreed. In my view, using AI to write code is neither engineering nor craftsmanship, but an abrogation of the responsibility to deliver a quality product. It isn’t engineering, it’s management, and these days (given the quantity of code agents spew out) it’s management without responsible oversight. Seriously, I’m distressed at how the industry is drinking the poison kool-aid.

New comment by wduquette in "Schemy Lisp En DOS"

wduquette — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:02:46 +0000

To be fair, Borland pushed MS out of the way first, IIRC. Borland was affordable; Microsoft Pascal and C were not. I miss Borland; they did good work.

New comment by wduquette in "AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts"

wduquette — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:01:38 +0000

It occurs to me that letting AI agent process your incoming e-mail really isn't that different in principle than letting incoming e-mail include scripts to run at your console. Why are people so eager to rush into this brave new world?

New comment by wduquette in "AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts"

wduquette — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:46:39 +0000

I anticipate a lengthy series of catastrophes initiated by AI agents with too much power and too little sense. Today the agent accidentally deletes your repo; tomorrow we lose a day's worth of banking transactions; Friday the cell phone network goes down. Such things, if sufficiently destructive, could result in widespread hunger, etc.

But killing all humans? Not likely.

New comment by wduquette in "Bespoke: A programming language for people who say please"

wduquette — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:41:58 +0000

This isn't Intercal, this is an advanced version of AppleScript.

New comment by wduquette in "Wildfire Survivors Push Back Against Newsom-Led Utility Bailout"

wduquette — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:18:40 +0000

Have you a source for "billions in profit" as opposed to "billions in revenue"? If so, I'd be interested to see it, especially relative to SCE's current maintenance budget. I don't object to being proven wrong.

My main point, though, is that the regulatory environment here in California has evolved without due regard for the law of unintended consequences.

New comment by wduquette in "Wildfire Survivors Push Back Against Newsom-Led Utility Bailout"

wduquette — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:12:50 +0000

I have every sympathy for the folks who lost homes here in California last year; it could easily have been my house. But what a lot of discussions miss regarding SCE's role in the Altadena fire is that SCE is a public utility, and California's Public Utilities Commission has not been allowing SCE (or other utilities, like PG&E) to charge rates that would allow them to do the required maintenance to prevent fires. In another case, some years ago, I understand that a fire in Northern California started next to a PG&E substation; the brush had not been trimmed, so I'm told, because environmental regulation didn't allow it.

From where I sit, this is not simply a "power company bad" situation; the state has played a significant role.

New comment by wduquette in "Don't enthusiastically agree to rewrite the system at work"

wduquette — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 03:07:53 +0000

The problem here isn’t the rewrite, the problem here is toxic management, massive feature creep, unrealistic expectations, etc., etc. You’d have been doomed without the rewrite.

New comment by wduquette in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

wduquette — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:18:16 +0000

Datalog could handle it, though.

New comment by wduquette in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

wduquette — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:34:52 +0000

This is one of those perennial ideas; let's get rid of hierarchical file systems and just keep all the files in a database. Speaking as a user who knows how to keep things organized, I like hierarchical file systems. Store the data in a database if you like, but don't break my metaphor.

New comment by wduquette in "Executable Is a SQLite Database"

wduquette — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:33:00 +0000

The TCL community experimented with an idea like this many years ago; they were called "structured documents" or "starpacks". What we found was that (A) it's usually more convenient to keep the data in a separate file, and (B) virus checkers can get suspicious when your app starts modifying itself, leading to unintentional comedy in operations. YMMV.

New comment by wduquette in "Young Americans increasingly fear AI will take their jobs"

wduquette — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:51:48 +0000

Young Americans have been fed a constant diet of “the Modern World is Awful” and “You Are Doomed” for quite some time now. This is just the next round, and as always it is overstated.

New comment by wduquette in ""Sike" vs. "Psych""

wduquette — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:49:41 +0000

I'd not seen the spelling "sike" until today; but I've been spelling it "psych" since I was in grade school in the early 70's. Definitely derives from "psyching someone out", i.e., confusing them or tricking them (in that I first heard "psych" as shorthand for "psych out"). I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's older than that.

New comment by wduquette in "Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail"

wduquette — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:47:49 +0000

The ecosystem makes it feasible to use the language or not. For my personal projects, I won't use a language that doesn't provide some kind of straightforward cross-platform GUI toolkit (nearly) out of the box—which narrows the field enormously.

But it's the syntax and semantics what determine whether I'd want to use the language to begin with, and how maintainable the resulting code is.

New comment by wduquette in "Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)"

wduquette — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:49:59 +0000

I had at least one Gateway 2000 desktop and several laptops over time. All but the last laptop were lovely machines. The last looked good on paper, but it was thicker and heavier than it should have been, and start losing keycaps fairly quickly.

New comment by wduquette in "SupererDuperer"

wduquette — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 05:16:34 +0000

Me, too.

New comment by wduquette in "Dates That Don't Exist (2015)"

wduquette — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:19:15 +0000

Fair point.

New comment by wduquette in ""Clean" Code, Horrible Performance (2023)"

wduquette — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:17:58 +0000

To be clear, I greatly disagree with Clean Code’s notion of what constitutes readable and maintainable code.

New comment by wduquette in ""Clean" Code, Horrible Performance (2023)"

wduquette — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:57:52 +0000

Make it work, then make it "clean" (that is, readable and maintainable); then make it fast, and only if measurement indicates that it matters.