Ben Lynn
benlynn.blogspot.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Ben Lynn, a Google engineer, writes about programming languages, data structures, Unicode, and shell scripts.
What HN saysCommenters note his affection for many languages, link his post arguing UTF-16 is bad, and cite his crit-bit tree and Android posts.
15HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
10stories submitted
276story points
6 years agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1UTF-8 good, UTF-16 bad2 people · 117 points · first shared 2011 · 90 comments on HN
- 2Why laziness matters2 people · 4 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 3List Comprehensions in C1 people · 63 points · first shared 2011 · 8 comments on HN
- 4The timeless beauty of shell scripts1 people · 43 points · first shared 2010 · 21 comments on HN
- 5Trees, Hash Tables and Tries1 people · 32 points · first shared 2010 · 23 comments on HN
- 6A really fundamental data structure1 people · 11 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 7Solving the JavaScript problem1 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
- 8Lambda the Penultimate1 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 9Laziness Is Next to Godliness1 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 10Homepage1 people · first shared 2011
- 11Developing android without eclipse or1 people · first shared 2010
- 12It go time 66441 people · first shared 2009
- 13Trees hash tables and tries 111 people · first shared 2013
What HN people wrote when they linked it
nkurz · 2011-04-07
Judging by his blog (http://benlynn.blogspot.com/) it looks like he has considerable affection for many languages beyond C. And I think you may have misinterpreted his comparison with Fortran: rather than showing how handily C beats Fortran (fish in a barrel), he seems to be saying that even with some C99 improvements, there still are places where Fortran has the advantage (refreshingly heretical). It's definitely not a piece for beginners, but I think it may be a more balanced picture than you present.
ky3 · 2013-05-10
I think this is a cool project, but surely needs more of a preamble? Like what are crit-bit trees? [1,2,3,4]
[1] http://benlynn.blogspot.com/2007/04/trees-hash-tables-and-tries_11.htm…
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_tree
[3] http://cr.yp.to/critbit.html
[4] http://www.imperialviolet.org/binary/critbit.pdf
julian37 · 2011-02-27
Appears to be mostly good information, though I'm surprised he paints UTF-16 in such a positive light ("optimized for languages residing in the 2 byte character range."). UTF-16 should be considered harmful:
http://benlynn.blogspot.com/2011/02/utf-8-good-utf-16-bad.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1049947/should-utf-16-be-considered…
gte910h · 2010-10-25
And the obligatory "Without Eclipse":
http://benlynn.blogspot.com/2009/01/developing-android-without-eclipse…
http://www.anddev.org/novice-tutorials-f8/developing-android-apps-with…
qcassidy · 2009-12-18
The author works for Google, and his most recent blog post is actually about the Go language:
http://benlynn.blogspot.com/2009/11/it-go-time_6644.html