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Christian Ekrem

cekrem.github.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2022

Christian Ekrem, a developer who likes Elm and functional programming, writes about software design, theory building, and programming craft.

What HN saysCommenters link his posts on Naur's theory building and the lack of a silver bullet when discussing AI-generated code and mental models.
23HN people shared it
3linked it in comments
37stories submitted
308story points
2 months agolast shared
2022people per year2026

Most-shared posts

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    There Is Still No Silver Bullet
    3 people · 5 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
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    Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Resists It
    3 people · 5 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Liskov Substitution: The real meaning of inheritance
    2 people · 75 points · first shared 2025 · 89 comments on HN
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    Why I Hope I Get to Write a Lot of Elm Code in 2025
    2 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  7. 7
    A Use Case for Port Boundaries in Front End Development
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    Coding as Craft: Going Back to the Old Gym
    1 people · 98 points · first shared 2025 · 93 comments on HN
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    I'm taking a three-week LLM fast
    1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
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    Replacing Hugo with a Custom Kotlin Blog Engine
    1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
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What HN people wrote when they linked it

anishjain123 · 2025-10-01
Interesting, reminds me of Peter Naur’s (https://cekrem.github.io/posts/programming-as-theory-building-naur/) beliefs where building mental models is more important than the mere code output itself So easy to fall into a slop tsunami without actually knowing what the code does or how it works
mpyne · 2026-05-17
> The process didn’t work before because the person writing the requirements either put out vague requirements or bad requirements because they didn’t understand the business intent (or were careless). You make it sound like writing good requirements is easy. If it were easy we wouldn't need all these concepts around PMF, product pivots and the like. And even before that was Peter Naur's paper "Programming as Theory Building" [1]. If you truly understand the problem you're solving with software then requirements can be easy. But usually we don't, not right away, and so we have to build up our understanding of the problem first in order to solve it. Even then, the problem we solve may not have been the problem paying users will have, so you can have "good requirements" and still have a bad business, or even the opposite where you somehow build a working business despite bad requirements, because you hit upon a customer's need quite by mistake. Nothing about any of this precludes LLMs being helpful, though nothing guarantees LLMs will be helpful either. [1]: https://cekrem.github.io/posts/programming-as-theory-building-naur/

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