Nano-Blog
A collection of short items related to the culture and practice of software development.
§ August 24, 2025
-
Valve Handbook as a Carrier of Culture
Over a decade ago the Valve published a "Handbook for New Employees". It's gone on to be debunked as a handbook, but instead more of a recruiting tool. (See the discussion at Hacker News for more info.) It may not describe the culture Valve has, but certainly describes the culture they want prospective employees to think they have.
Title Page of Valve's Handbook for New Employees Either way it's worth a read: VALVE: HANDBOOK FOR NEW EMPLOYEES. It is said that "Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch" (or Breakfast, depending on where you source the quote from.) And there's probably a lot to be gained from looking at how Valve wants prospective employees to view its culture.
§ August 15, 2025
-
The Coming Software Apocalypse
Nearly a decade ago, James Somers, wrote an article for The Atlantic about how software bugs scale in relationship to system complexity. The article, The Coming Software Apocalypse, despite being 8 years old, doesn't seem that dated. Written before AI went mainstream, it focuses on how (at a high level) difficult bugs creep into software systems and proposes a few ideas luminaries in our industry are proposing.
Written for a general audience, programmers will find it lacks specific details like "where can I download these tools?" or "how do I implement these ideas in my emacs-focused workflow?" But it's still worth reading as an overview, a warning and a demonstration we're still in the software crisis.
P.S. - James also maintains a list of items he's written for mainstream publications and books he's read. It's equal parts self-promotion and a travelogue for literary odyssey. Would that more people would have the presence of mind to share such things.
§ August 14, 2025
-
Bret Victor is known for many things. The worrydream.com website (with it's excellent list of seminal papers) and DynamicLand spring immediately to mind. But he's also known for delivering a very good presentation about a better future for software designers. The talk from 2012 is available on YouTube:
Worth a watch by anyone curious about how we may think about software and it's development.
§ August 4, 2025
-
Nary a month goes by that we do not come across another small Lisp online. And why not? Like FORTH, Lisp is a simple language to implement and many developers code their own as a way of learning the details of the language.
We previously covered two small Lisps: April 24, 2025 : A Very Small Lisp in 99 Lines of C and May 20, 2025 : On the Subject of Pico-Lisp. The Lisp we are reporting on today looks similar to van Engelen's small lisp in C, but is its own creation. If you're interested in implementing your own Lisp (and who isn't these days?) examining several previous implementations is probably not wasted effort.
The implementation we're reporting on here, Micro-Lisp is currently hosted on @sepisoad's github account, but retains A. Carl Douglas' copyright notice. I suspect this is because it's no longer available on @carld's corner of github. But the Wayback Machine archived a copy of a decent description of what's going on with the code at https://web.archive.org/web/20230922184900/https://carld.github.io/2017/06/20/lisp-in-less-than-200-lines-of-c.html
Worth a read if you're hip to writing your own small Lisp.
§ July 28, 2025
-
Software developer and writer Sinclair Target penned a very nice essay attempting to answer the question "Why do some programmers really like Lisp?"
Jumping between that famous XKCD comic about Lisp to a bit of history about John McCarthy to Terry Winograd, Target eventually forms a three pronged thesis. I won't give away the ending. It's probably fine to just say it's a merry jaunt through computer programming language design history and leave it at that. Worth the time it takes to read for the community interested in such things.
The text is available at Two-Bit History under the title How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language.
-
Bret Victor's List of Notable Papers
Public intellectual Bret Victor should be no stranger to readers of this blog. He is a technologist with "Big Ideas." If you're looking for the "next big thing", it's probably mentioned as a reference in one of his presentations.
The "/refs" section of his web site (worrydream.com) is a delightful list of notable papers about technology and how we think about technology. In curating this list, he's acted as a bit of a librarian and opinionated guide to our conception of human technological progress. These aren't listicles about "Ten Surprising Features of 10x Python Engineers (You'll Never Believe Number Seven)," but ground-breaking papers like Christopher Alexander's A City Is Not A Tree or Alan Kay's A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages. If you have some spare time, grab a paper at random from this list... each of these papers is well worth the time it takes to read.
You can find the list on Bret's site at worrydream.com/refs.
§ July 24, 2025
-
Fennel is a newish lisp that looks sort of like Clojure and compiles down to Lua bytecodes. While Lua is an interesting mix of inspired language design and downright weird, a version of its VM has been ported to tiny microcontrollers, making it a decent alternative to things like MicroPython. Via Fennel, it's not a little easier to build embedded apps on small microcontrollers with a member of the lisp family of languages.
Into this environment comes Andrey Listopadov's require-fennel.el package which lets elisp talk to a Fennel instance. So if there's code that's easier to implment in Fennel (or if you have an existing Fennel app you want to "port" to emacs-lisp), require-fennel.el makes it easy to extend Emacs with Fennel code. Details are provided in Andrey's post Extending Emacs w/ Fennel.
§ July 23, 2025
-
Collection of Counter-Intuitive CS Results
@hwayne (Hillel Wayne) has composed a nice collection of Cold Showers, or CS papers reporting counter-intuitive results on overhyped topics. As an example, they counter the statement "Static Typing reduces bugs" with a reference to a 2014 paper showing research in the topic is inconclusive. We wish the collection, hosted at GitHub (https://github.com/hwayne/awesome-cold-showers), was larger. If you have results to add to the collection, maybe Hillel would accept a pull request.
As an aside, Hillel Wayne has an interesting website at https://hillelwayne.com/ with blog posts that would probably be interesting to the general programming community. And they are the author of (the books) Practical TLA+ : Planning Driven Development and Logic for Programmers and the Learn TLA(+) website. Reading a text on TLA+ and its application to real-world problems is always time well spent.
§ July 21, 2025
-
The Terminals Shine Like Stars
The computer center is empty,
Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans.
I walk the rows of CPUs,
My skin prickling with magnetic flux.
I open a door, cold and hard,
And watch the lights dancing on the panels.
A machine without soul, men call it,
But its soul is the sweat of my comrades,
Within it lie the years of our lives,
Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy,
The algorithmic exultations,
The long nights filled with thankless toil,
I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter,
And in the darkened offices
The terminals shine like stars.
§ July 20, 2025
-
BYTE Magazine's 1979 Overview of Lisp
It's no secret the staff at the Bit Roastery are Lisp fans. And for no other reason than that, we recommend reading the "Overview of Lisp" from BYTE Magazine's August 1979 issue (hosted at the Internet Archive.)
Figure: Cover of the August 1979 issue of Byte Magazine (the Lisp Issue.) Lisp is less of a single language specification and more of a family of similar languages. This article does a decent job providing the flavor of the language while explaining its basics. It's short and worth a read if you're unfamiliar with the language or why some people seen to love it.
Retrocomputing enthusiasts may enjoy other articles the same issue about porting Lisp to the 6800 microprocessor or a random investigation of producing graphics on a TRS-80.