Steve Yegge
steve-yegge.blogspot.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Steve Yegge, a longtime programmer at Amazon and Google, wrote long, humorous essays on languages, software culture, and hiring.
What HN saysCommenters rank him among the best bloggers they have read, with good humor and vision, though the blog is now mostly dormant.
839HN people shared it
612linked it in comments
351stories submitted
7.1Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns (2006)113 people · 217 points · first shared 2008 · 25 comments on HN
- 2Get that job at Google54 people · 118 points · first shared 2008 · 74 comments on HN
- 3Rich Programmer Food43 people · 398 points · first shared 2007 · 103 comments on HN
- 4Steve Yegge: Have you ever legalized marijuana?36 people · 128 points · first shared 2009 · 50 comments on HN
- 5Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy Is Killing You (2020)36 people · 25 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret31 people · 90 points · first shared 2008 · 102 comments on HN
- 7Welcome to Gas Town28 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 8Done, and Gets Things Smart26 people · 231 points · first shared 2008 · 65 comments on HN
- 9Steve Yegge: Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp. (2006)22 people · 241 points · first shared 2007 · 92 comments on HN
- 10The Monkey and the Apple – Steve Yegge Game22 people · 11 points · first shared 2007 · 3 comments on HN
- 11The Next Big Language21 people · 180 points · first shared 2007 · 71 comments on HN
- 12The Universal Design Pattern20 people · 145 points · first shared 2008 · 44 comments on HN
- 13Agile: 5 years later and you're still doing it wrong19 people · 312 points · first shared 2007 · 77 comments on HN
- 14Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit18 people · 469 points · first shared 2010 · 109 comments on HN
- 15Portrait of a N00b18 people · 274 points · first shared 2008 · 67 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
truly · 2021-11-14
For anyone who does not "know" him, he has/had an excellent blog (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/). No updates lately, but it was very good for its time.
jsmeaton · 2017-03-12
Steve Yegge was one of the best bloggers I've read. Other than a post from November it'd been dark for a few years. Still a good read though.
https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.au/
https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/blog-rants
guard-of-terra · 2017-01-30
Steve Yegge http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
Wil Shipley https://blog.wilshipley.com/
Yossi Kreinin http://yosefk.com/
All three brilliant, with good sense of humor and having good "vision thing"
andrix · 2010-10-30
Emacs. I've used to to code in Vim/Gvim, but I switched to Emacs just to try and learn about Lisp. Emacs has tons of interesting "plugins" to add, and actually I'm using emacs as my Organizer (using org-mode) too.
Emacs hasn't anything to envy to any of those bloated IDE's like Eclipse or VS. I recommend to you:
* http://www.emacswiki.org
* http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
Steve Yegge has a lot of articles about Emacs/Elisp and it has been a excellent source of information to me.
jrockway · 2009-01-30
I enjoy random blogs (yay for link agregation sites), but MJD and Steve Yegge continually write content worth reading:
MJD: http://blog.plover.com/
Yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
ricardo · 2008-11-29
Steve Yegge's essays are a great read: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
KronisLV · 2026-07-07
> I had to read this sentence twice.
Heh, I mean I'm not running Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04 so as far as AI stuff go, I'd assume that I'm not too much of an outlier.
Either way, wrote about my experiences with GLM Coding Subscription a bit more on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model-but-is-it…
I do suspect that there's plenty of people who'd use way fewer tokens.
krackers · 2026-04-16
Which specific ones though allow you to send input to a window without raising it? People have been trying to do "focus follows mouse [without auto raise]" for a long time on mac, and the synthetic event equivalent to command+click is the only discovered method I'm aware of, e.g. used in https://github.com/sbmpost/AutoRaise
There is also this old blog post by Yegge [1] which mentions `AXUIElementPostKeyboardEvent` but there were plenty of bugs with that, and I haven't seen anyone else build on it. I guess it's a good candidate though, perhaps the Sky team they acquired knows the right private APIs to use to get this working.
[1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/settling-osx-focus-follows-mo…
idreyn · 2026-04-05
> He argued that Modern Chinese has become “lazy” by forgetting how to use its own verbs. instead of “researching” (研究, yanjiu), speakers “conduct research” (进行研究, jinxing yanjiu)
I can't help but think of this classic essay about Java OOP: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns…
NateEag · 2026-03-26
The most obvious one is this brilliant piece on complexity:
https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-marij…
It doesn't match OP's description, but it certainly fits talk about his pot use.
There may be others.
ewoodrich · 2026-01-23
Okay yeah, not great...
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-249b924a62…
Cedricgc · 2026-01-19
I'm developing concern for Steve. He's been a well known developer and writer in the industry for years now (See his popular 'Google Platforms Rant' essay from years ago) [0].
Now, Yegge's writing tilts towards the grandoise... see his writing when joining Grab [1] and Sourcegraph [2] respectively versus how things actually played out.
I prefer optimism and I'm not anti AI by any means, but given his observed behavior and how AI can't exacerbate certain pathologies... not great. Adding the recent crypto activities on top and all that entails is the ingredients for a powder keg.
Hope someone is looking out for him.
[0] https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers/yegge-pla…
[1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-grab-86dfffc0…
[2] https://sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge
jsight · 2026-01-19
To be fair, he's always been a little loopy. At least, I think this post of his was loopy: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-old-marshmallow-maze-spe…
It was also one of my favorite posts of his and has aged incredibly well as my experience has grown.
virtualSatai · 2026-01-13
A follow up to the previous discussion Welcome to Gas Town [0][1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46458936
[1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04
jumploops · 2026-01-07
I’ve found that experienced devs use agentic coding in a more “hands-on” way than beginners and pure vibe-coders.
Vibecoders are the best because they push the models in humorous and unexpected ways.
Junior devs are like “I automated the deploy process via an agent and this markdown file”
Seasoned devs will spend more time writing the prompt for a bug fix, or lazily paste the error and then make the 1-line change themselves.
The current crop of LLMs are more powerful than any of these use cases, and it’s exciting to see experienced devs start to figure that out (I’m not stanning Gas Town[0], but it’s a glimpse of the potential).
[0]https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04
fmjrey · 2025-11-25
Here is an example of a 2006 rant that qualifies: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns…
OO conflates many different aspects that are often orthogonal but have been conflated together opportunistically rather than by sound rigor. Clearly most languages allow for functions outside classes. It's clearly the case today especially with FP gaining momentum, but it's also clear back then when Java and the JVM were created. I think smalltalk was the only other language that had this limitation.
Like others in this thread, I can only recommend the big OOPS video: https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI
dahauns · 2025-10-31
I think the best description of this kind of "obfuscation" that especially afflicted Java still is Steve Yegge's "Kingdom of Nouns" rant:
https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns…
DeathArrow · 2025-10-30
From my pov, both inheritance and encapsulation aren't great if you have to maintain code and add new one.
Also, I dislike design patterns overuse, DDD done Uncle Bob style.
Also we can think of where OOP drives many teams to:
https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns…
https://factoryfactoryfactory.net/
https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition
lanstin · 2025-07-30
There is a great Steve Yegge post on how useful ad-hoc transformation of source code is: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html
The only time I have used this myself was an expat style transformer for terraform (HCL). We had a lot of terraform and they kept changing the language, so I would build a fixer to make code written for say 0.10 to work with 0.12 and then again for 0.14. It was very fun and let us keep updating to newer terraform versions. Pretty simple language except for distinguishing quoted blocks from non-quoted.
ReptileMan · 2025-06-20
https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/07/wikileaks-to-leak-5000-open-s…
Brilliant steve yegge article on the topic.
Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed
On a more serious note. While I can see the reason for private members, the case for private methods has always been much weaker.
adolph · 2025-03-20
> However, CI is not "configured", it is coded. . . . YAML was continuously extended to deal with that, so it developed into much more than just "markup", but it grew into this terrible chimera.
Brings to mind the classic "Kingdom of Nouns" [0] parable, which I read to my kid just last week. The multi-line "run" nodes in GitHub actions give me the heebie-jeebies, like how MUMPS data validation was maintained in metadata of VA-Fileman [1].
0. https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns…
1. https://www.hardhats.org/fileman/pm/gfs_frm.htm
xnorswap · 2024-10-02
And while this rant is a classic, I always preferred Yegge's "Execution in the kingdom of Nouns": http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.…
yjftsjthsd-h · 2024-09-22
Allow me to drop this classic: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-poli… (and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165445 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023392 ). Because yeah, "support" includes "are you going to keep making me do work just to keep using your platform". (Edit: To be clear, that's negative support, but it's on the same axis)
eastbound · 2024-09-09
Steve Yegge “Programming’s little dirty secret” (2008) was my reference on touch typing. Yes, it makes you better. Since then, I’ve had a great career, and every single one of my interns went through a touch-typing class.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-s…
physicles · 2024-05-02
> Second, all changes must be rooted in respect for existing usage and users
This is one of the reasons I love working in Go. I feel that the language maintainers understand that people using Go have more important work to do than update their code to whatever the new hotness is this month.
Basically the opposite of this: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-poli…
lancebeet · 2023-06-13
This reminds me of Steve Yegge's classic blog post "Programming's dirtiest little secret"[0]. Yegge's post is of course about touch-typing, but it essentially makes the same argument. Doing things slowly is a liability, not primarily because it consumes more time, but because it makes you opt out of doing certain things because of their perceived cost.
[0] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-s…
mprovost · 2023-03-27
Reminds me of this classic Steve Yegge post: "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work. If you're not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don't know how they work."
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html
astrange · 2023-03-18
Java is verbose because it's inexpressive, not because it's good at documenting. It's Objective-C with everything too interesting removed, but they never added enough of it back.
Classic essay being http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.…
zaptheimpaler · 2023-01-04
Reminds me a little of Steve Yegges classic Rich Programmer Food [1]
[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html