- Author
- Posted by MaxLeiter, with replies from many commenters
- Published
- 7 September 2025
- Kind
- Hacker News discussion thread on a short blog post by the poster
- Original
- news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45163043
- Subject
- Programming languages and types
What it is
MaxLeiter posted a personal blog post. Commenters quote it on Ada's R1000 and DIANA. Commenters then debate text storage, formatters and linters. The thread is long, with many nested replies.
What it says
- Commenters quote the post: Ada's R1000 stored DIANA trees, not text. Readers chose views.
- Many commenters object that non-text storage breaks grep, diff, sed and version control.
- Others reply that structure-aware tools already exist, and that git accepts custom diff tools.
- One proposal is canonical stored text, reformatted per user, perhaps with git filters.
- Many say formatting is bikeshedding best settled by an enforced formatter such as gofmt.
- Others defend hand formatting, such as aligned tables, that formatters can destroy.
- Commenters point to Unison and Smalltalk as systems with structured code stores.
What evidence it gives
The thread offers opinions, anecdotes and links to tools. The post is known only from commenters' quotes, which include a Grady Booch remark. Neither the post nor the thread offers measurements.
Interests and limits
The poster wrote the discussed article, so the thread starts from the poster's own framing. The post itself was not read, only quotes from it. Commenters are anonymous Hacker News readers. Claims about tools and history were not checked here. In a reply, the poster says the post should have covered formatting tooling more.