Ideolalia
ideolalia.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Zach Tellman writes essays on software design, programming language performance, and engineering practice, often involving Clojure.
What HN saysCommenters recommend it on tech blog lists and cite its essays on composition and Clojure performance, though one says the posts express feelings more than facts.
23HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
35stories submitted
673story points
2 years agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers5 people · 258 points · first shared 2020 · 75 comments on HN
- 2Better Geometry Through Graph Theory (2018)4 people · 180 points · first shared 2018 · 33 comments on HN
- 3Senior engineers reduce risk (2016)4 people · 8 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 4Composition is Interpretation3 people · 7 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 5Trapped in the Technologist Factory2 people · 38 points · first shared 2021 · 3 comments on HN
- 6Performance in Factor, Java, and Clojure2 people · 26 points · first shared 2009 · 16 comments on HN
- 7Two Concepts of Legibility2 people · 10 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 8Standing in the shadow of giants – the frontier in open source2 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 9Early adopters and inverted social proof (2011)2 people · 3 points · first shared 2014 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Creating a Simple Game in Clojure1 people · 57 points · first shared 2010 · 4 comments on HN
- 11The “Office Hours” Meetup (2014)1 people · 38 points · first shared 2020 · 4 comments on HN
- 12Rendering a Sierpinski Pyramid in Clojure1 people · 21 points · first shared 2009 · 10 comments on HN
- 13Better Geometry Through Graph Theory1 people · 5 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 14Early Adopters and Inverted Social Proof1 people · 5 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 15Exploring the Mandelbrot set with your GPU1 people · 5 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
ZephyrBlu · 2024-06-05
This is a tech-focused selection from my personal list, with a few more business-y sources thrown in:
- https://erikbern.com
- https://lethain.com
- https://commoncog.com
- https://scattered-thoughts.net
- https://danluu.com
- https://ideolalia.com
- https://staysaasy.com
- https://collabfund.com
- https://blog.nelhage.com
- https://jacobian.org
- https://equalventures.substack.com
- https://defmacro.org
- https://spakhm.com
- https://apenwarr.ca
- https://scarletink.com
- https://benkuhn.net
- https://cpojer.net
- https://brandur.org
- https://zeptonaut.com
Let me know if you want some reading recommendations for any of these!
nindalf · 2020-12-12
His posts aren’t fact based, they’re mostly an expression of his feelings.
A great example are his 5-6 posts talking about how the most important facet of a programming language is its brevity (https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sexers.html). At no point does he cite any facts backing that up. Even when the brevity chasing language he created failed to gain traction, he didn’t see that as an indication to recheck his assumptions.
In other words, “feelings don’t care about your facts”. But hey, there’s a market for that sort of article. So who are we to judge?
geofft · 2021-01-25
You might like this post, which is roughly on that topic: https://ideolalia.com/essays/composition-is-interpretation.html
(I thought of it when I first saw your comment but couldn't remember where, then I found it closing some few-day-old tabs :) )
prospero · 2012-08-24
Here's an Asteroids clone I wrote in Clojure a few years back, which has less than 400 lines and some neat stuff like procedurally generated 3D asteroids: https://github.com/ztellman/penumbra/blob/master/test/example/game/ast…
Some of the design decisions are discussed in detail at http://ideolalia.com/creating-a-simple-game-in-clojure
brehaut · 2010-06-09
I can't make an informed comparison[1], but check out http://ideolalia.com/performance-in-clojure-and-factor - the author uses penumbra (clojure's gl wrappers) to offload the vectorised computation to the GPU.
That plus clojures inherent concurrency support seems like a pretty awesome mix to me.
[1] I've used lots of python and some clojure but never done heavy numeric computation in either