Phil Hagelberg

@phil-hagelberg · 16 positions · On ppll ↗

Programmer known online as technomancy; author of Leiningen, the Clojure build tool, and a maintainer of the Fennel programming language.

Phil Hagelberg did not write this page.

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What Phil Hagelberg says most about

design 3

Because programming requires forgetting, developers should weigh the costs of their abstractions and who those abstractions leave out.
Software design that assumes text behaves predictably like English reflects the cultural bias of its typically white American developers.

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developer tools 3

Replacing a monopolistic platform with a single alternative isn't enough — real resilience requires diversity among competing platforms.
Metaprogramming in a language creates fundamental obstacles to static analysis of its code.

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JavaScript 2

The mass adoption of React and single-page-app architecture across nearly all web apps was driven by trend-following rather than technical fit, producing fragile, scripting-dependent software.
Mastodon's web client is a heavy React app that breaks without scripting and loads slowly on old hardware.

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open source 2

Making it hard to self-host concentrates network power in a technical elite.
Replacing a monopolistic platform with a single alternative isn't enough — real resilience requires diversity among competing platforms.

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privacy 2

Being easy to find online exposes people, especially those in marginalized groups, to a high risk of targeted abuse.
Real-name policies on social platforms exist mainly to make users legible for advertising and government surveillance, not user safety.

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software quality 2

Relying on metatables for method lookup tends to produce surprising, unpredictable behavior.
Metaprogramming in a language creates fundamental obstacles to static analysis of its code.

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