Subtype and topic

Essays & articles about Software engineering

Every link here is both an essay or article and about software engineering.

Hall of Fame: 111
Candidates: 221
Median span: 6.2 yrs
First seen: 2007

Strongest Hall records

111 items

Choose Boring Technology (2015)

mcfunley.com 41 submissions · 39 people · 11.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-06 Resurfaced 2023-10-01

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A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

james-iry.blogspot.com 42 submissions · 41 people · 17.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2012-01 Resurfaced 2023-06-25

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John Carmack on Inlined Code

number-none.com 21 submissions · 14 people · 11.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-01 Resurfaced 2024-10-06

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UTF-8 Everywhere

utf8everywhere.org 18 submissions · 17 people · 13.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-06 Resurfaced 2020-04-14

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Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

lists.busybox.net 8 submissions · 8 people · 13.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-05 Resurfaced 2026-01-04

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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)

www.kalzumeus.com 29 submissions · 27 people · 15.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-11 Resurfaced 2021-03-07

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Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)

adamdrake.com 11 submissions · 10 people · 7.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-03 Resurfaced 2026-01-18

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How I do my computing

stallman.org 12 submissions · 12 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-10 Resurfaced 2023-07-29

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-2000 lines of code

www.folklore.org 10 submissions · 9 people · 12.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-03 Resurfaced 2022-11-05

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Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++ (2012)

250bpm.com 8 submissions · 8 people · 11.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-04 Resurfaced 2022-08-12 archived copy

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Falsehoods programmers believe about time

infiniteundo.com 14 submissions · 13 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-01 Resurfaced 2022-08-22

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What Color is Your Function? (2015)

journal.stuffwithstuff.com 25 submissions · 22 people · 11.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-05 Resurfaced 2026-05-26

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A Spellchecker Used To Be A Major Feat of Software Engineering

prog21.dadgum.com 9 submissions · 9 people · 17.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-12 Resurfaced 2025-08-09

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Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

www.viemu.com 10 submissions · 10 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-04 Resurfaced 2021-12-07 archived copy

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A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++

blog.regehr.org 15 submissions · 15 people · 14.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-08 Resurfaced 2025-03-13

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Parse, Don’t Validate

lexi-lambda.github.io 9 submissions · 9 people · 6.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-03 Resurfaced 2026-02-10

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My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)

yosefk.com 16 submissions · 16 people · 14.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-08 Resurfaced 2024-12-28

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What is code

www.bloomberg.com 20 submissions · 19 people · 10.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-06 Resurfaced 2026-01-01 archived copy

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The Hardest Program I've Ever Written – How a code formatter works (2015)

journal.stuffwithstuff.com 11 submissions · 7 people · 10.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-11 Resurfaced 2025-10-29

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Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful

vorpus.org 19 submissions · 19 people · 8.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-03 Resurfaced 2022-07-02

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In defense of swap: common misconceptions (2018)

chrisdown.name 9 submissions · 9 people · 7.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-04 Resurfaced 2025-09-21

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Java's Cover (April 2001)

www.paulgraham.com 13 submissions · 13 people · 13.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-06 Resurfaced 2022-06-26

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Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

www.mjt.me.uk 13 submissions · 13 people · 12.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-10 Resurfaced 2020-10-29

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Return of the Mac (2005)

www.paulgraham.com 8 submissions · 8 people · 15.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-04 Resurfaced 2021-07-04

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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)

queue.acm.org 8 submissions · 8 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-08 Resurfaced 2023-10-18

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The JavaScript Trap

www.gnu.org 13 submissions · 13 people · 15.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2015-03 Resurfaced 2014-12-06

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The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer (2001)

www.willamette.edu 14 submissions · 14 people · 13.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-02 Resurfaced 2021-01-04

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Less is Exponentially More (2012)

commandcenter.blogspot.com 10 submissions · 10 people · 13.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-05 Resurfaced 2022-11-13

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C Is Not a Low-Level Language

queue.acm.org 8 submissions · 7 people · 7.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2025-02 Resurfaced 2023-10-16

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Git koans

stevelosh.com 12 submissions · 12 people · 12.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-08 Resurfaced 2020-12-23

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Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)

www.joelonsoftware.com 31 submissions · 31 people · 9.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2024-02 Resurfaced 2024-02-29

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Advantages of Monorepos (2015)

danluu.com 15 submissions · 9 people · 9.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-02 Resurfaced 2022-04-07

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On the foolishness of “natural language programming”

www.cs.utexas.edu 8 submissions · 8 people · 12.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-09 Resurfaced 2023-05-16

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Open Source is Not About You

gist.github.com 10 submissions · 9 people · 7.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-07 Resurfaced 2026-02-13

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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)

itvision.altervista.org 9 submissions · 9 people · 4.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-08 Resurfaced 2022-08-06

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Page Weight Matters

blog.chriszacharias.com 12 submissions · 10 people · 11.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-04 Resurfaced 2022-07-29

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The Lisp Curse

www.winestockwebdesign.com 7 submissions · 6 people · 10.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-09 Resurfaced 2022-03-25

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Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006)

regex.info 12 submissions · 12 people · 14.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-12 Resurfaced 2020-12-14

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It’s Not Wrong that “ ”.length == 7

hsivonen.fi 6 submissions · 6 people · 6.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2024-12 Resurfaced 2025-08-22

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$400M in assets to bankrupt in 45-minutes because of a failed deployment (2014)

dougseven.com 12 submissions · 12 people · 9.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-09 Resurfaced 2023-09-10

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Rob Pike's Rules of Programming (1989)

users.ece.utexas.edu 6 submissions · 6 people · 11.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-11 Resurfaced 2023-11-01

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Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)

prog21.dadgum.com 10 submissions · 10 people · 14.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-04 Resurfaced 2024-10-20

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The Wrong Abstraction (2016)

www.sandimetz.com 10 submissions · 9 people · 9.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-05 Resurfaced 2023-05-13

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Apple’s Mistake (2009)

www.paulgraham.com 8 submissions · 8 people · 12.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2014-03 Resurfaced 2022-02-21

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Monolith First (2015)

martinfowler.com 10 submissions · 10 people · 7.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-02 Resurfaced 2024-09-16

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Lisp as an Alternative to Java

norvig.com 7 submissions · 7 people · 12.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-12 Resurfaced 2021-08-02

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Why You Should Never Use MongoDB

www.sarahmei.com 6 submissions · 6 people · 10.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-02 Resurfaced 2021-02-01

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Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies (2017)

www.nayuki.io 9 submissions · 8 people · 8.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-11 Resurfaced 2025-06-04

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Holding a Program in One's Head (2007)

paulgraham.com 7 submissions · 5 people · 13.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-07 Resurfaced 2018-09-21

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The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

grugbrain.dev 12 submissions · 12 people · 3.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2025-06 Resurfaced 2025-06-17

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Why Use Make

bost.ocks.org 6 submissions · 6 people · 12.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-01 Resurfaced 2023-01-11

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Software Disenchantment (2018)

tonsky.me 7 submissions · 7 people · 5.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-06 Resurfaced 2023-10-23

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ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text

ronaldduncan.wordpress.com 8 submissions · 8 people · 10.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2024-11 Resurfaced 2024-11-10

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A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack

blog.moertel.com 9 submissions · 7 people · 11.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-12 Resurfaced 2022-03-08

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Start all of your commands with a comma

rhodesmill.org 6 submissions · 3 people · 6.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-02 Resurfaced 2026-02-04

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BSD vs. Linux (2005)

www.over-yonder.net 9 submissions · 9 people · 9.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-08 Resurfaced 2018-11-30

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The Fallacy of Premature Optimization (2009)

ubiquity.acm.org 8 submissions · 7 people · 12.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-12 Resurfaced 2022-10-28

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Java for Everything (2014)

www.teamten.com 6 submissions · 6 people · 8.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-07 Resurfaced 2021-04-25

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Oberon (2009)

ignorethecode.net 7 submissions · 7 people · 13.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-08 Resurfaced 2022-08-26

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Running Lisp in Production (2020)

www.grammarly.com 7 submissions · 6 people · 6.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-02 Resurfaced 2023-08-12

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Recently resurfaced

latest 20+ point return

Queues don't fix overload (2014)

ferd.ca 8 submissions · 8 people · 11.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2024-01 Resurfaced 2026-06-09

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Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us

overreacted.io 8 submissions · 8 people · 6.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-05 Resurfaced 2026-05-26

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What Color is Your Function? (2015)

journal.stuffwithstuff.com 25 submissions · 22 people · 11.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-05 Resurfaced 2026-05-26

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Open Source is Not About You

gist.github.com 10 submissions · 9 people · 7.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-07 Resurfaced 2026-02-13

734max pts

Parse, Don’t Validate

lexi-lambda.github.io 9 submissions · 9 people · 6.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-03 Resurfaced 2026-02-10

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Candidates

Browse 221 candidates

The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]

www.usenix.org 18 submissions · 16 people · 9.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-03-12

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)

www.cs.virginia.edu 17 submissions · 17 people · 14.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-12-31

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

charlespetzold.com 8 submissions · 8 people · 14.2 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-01-01 archived copy

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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C Is Best

sqlite.org 4 submissions · 4 people · 7.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2026-01-06

Needs:5 submissions

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Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)

www.dwheeler.com 15 submissions · 15 people · 17.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-03-17

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

www.cs.unm.edu 11 submissions · 9 people · 16.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2018-03-03

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Why Most Unit Testing is Waste [pdf]

www.rbcs-us.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 5.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-06-28

Needs:5 submissions

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Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)

www.loper-os.org 4 submissions · 4 people · 9.4 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-04-09

Needs:5 submissions

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What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?

www.sqlite.org 4 submissions · 4 people · 8.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-09-04

Needs:5 submissions

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If PHP Were British

www.addedbytes.com 11 submissions · 11 people · 5.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2013-03-26

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

josephg.com 7 submissions · 7 people · 6.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-02-13

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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30 years later, QBasic is still the best

www.nicolasbize.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 7.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-01-17

Needs:5 submissions

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Hyrum's Law

www.hyrumslaw.com 12 submissions · 11 people · 7.4 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-08-01

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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B-Heap vs. Binary Heap (2010)

queue.acm.org 11 submissions · 11 people · 15.4 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2018-03-18

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry (2013)

prog21.dadgum.com 13 submissions · 13 people · 13.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-11-10

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Three Tribes of Programming (2017)

josephg.com 9 submissions · 9 people · 7.9 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-06-26

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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I can’t believe I’m praising Tcl

www.yosefk.com 8 submissions · 8 people · 16.4 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-05-04

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Handles Are the Better Pointers

floooh.github.io 13 submissions · 11 people · 7.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-06-21

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse C# programmer

lukeplant.me.uk 12 submissions · 12 people · 9.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-08-11

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Readme Driven Development

tom.preston-werner.com 9 submissions · 7 people · 12.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-11-26

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Books Programmers Don't Really Read (2008)

www.billthelizard.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 7.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2016-10-14

Needs:5 submissions

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My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs (2002)

www.gnu.org 10 submissions · 9 people · 16.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-10-20

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language

twobithistory.org 6 submissions · 6 people · 5.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-05-13

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)

suricrasia.online 6 submissions · 6 people · 5.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-08-26

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)

fasterthanli.me 9 submissions · 8 people · 4.9 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-07-25

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Did Ken, Ritchie and Brian choose wrong with NUL-terminated text strings? (2011)

queue.acm.org 9 submissions · 9 people · 12.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2018-01-16

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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“Design Patterns” Aren't (2002)

perl.plover.com 5 submissions · 3 people · 12.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-03-07

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Why Go and Not Rust?

kristoff.it 4 submissions · 4 people · 5.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-01-27

Needs:5 submissions

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Why Go Is Not Good

yager.io 5 submissions · 5 people · 6.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2015-12-09

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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The Nature of Lisp (2006)

www.defmacro.org 9 submissions · 9 people · 13.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-10-26

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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A Constructive Look at TempleOS (2015)

www.codersnotes.com 10 submissions · 10 people · 8.9 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-11-12

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering

blogs.uw.edu 8 submissions · 8 people · 9.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2015-09-13

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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IBM's infamous "Black Team" (2002)

www.t3.org 15 submissions · 4 people · 12.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2015-08-29

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016)

cacm.acm.org 6 submissions · 6 people · 4.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-01-11

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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GUI Architectures

martinfowler.com 8 submissions · 8 people · 12.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2017-05-02

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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History of T

www.paulgraham.com 8 submissions · 6 people · 15.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-07-15

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

byorgey.wordpress.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 8.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2026-06-14

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart5 submissions

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Write code like you just learned how to program

prog21.dadgum.com 7 submissions · 7 people · 15.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-10-14

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retrospective

blog.darknedgy.net 4 submissions · 4 people · 4.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-08-06

Needs:5 submissions

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Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

www.teamten.com 3 submissions · 3 people · 4.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-06-14

Needs:5 submissions

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