Systems Past: software innovations we actually use (2014)
Report a link problem
Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderRead the section "Conclusion" at the end, if nothing else. It is extremely well written. The author throws out some potentially controversial ideas, but he (like many people I have seen) are all hoping for a common outcome - dramatically "rethinking" the concept of the OS and programming language, but really embracing ideas that are as old as time. I'll highlight one section: "Most of all, let’s rethink the received wisdom that you should teach your computer to do things…
> FORTRAN’s conflation of functions (an algebraic concept) and subroutines (a programming construct) persists to this day in nearly every piece of software, and causes no end of problems. This is exactly what Haskell solves. Not by eliminating subroutines, but by separating the two concepts out again. In particular, functions are functions in the algebraic sense, and subroutines just become values in the IO type. > Tracing compilers scratch the surface of reversing this mistake, but so far I know…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 288
- Total comments
- 206
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-03-14 | Systems Past: The software innovations we actually useFirst breakout | vilhelm_s | 135 | 96 |
| 2016-04-25 | Let’s do some old-school hacking on our new-school hardware (2014) | panic | 1 | 0 |
| 2016-04-25 | Systems Past: the only 8 software innovations we actually use | daveloyall | 2 | 0 |
| 2016-04-30 | All the digital revolutions was already invented between 1955 – 1977 | ReneFroger | 2 | 0 |
| 2016-12-28 | Systems Past: software innovations we actually use (2014)Best thread · Latest 20+ point return | ingve | 148 | 110 |