Why I stopped "Opinions and Programming" blog

Posted on January 10, 2021 by Robert Peszek

I used to blog here: Opinions and Programming.

My most read blogs were the series I don’t like Hibernate and Grails. It presented some lessons learned from using Grails in anger. Here are the direct links: the series started with Part 1 and ended with Part 11. This series topped the list of most read Groovy language blogs (according to groovyblogs.org) for several months back in 2014.

Opinions and Programming site illustrates my programming journey and my fascination with functional programming. Includes my old posts about figlet (functional programming library I wrote for Groovy) staring from this old post to Monadic Comprehensions in Groovy/Fpiglet. Functional programming never caught on in Groovy, fpiglet was one of the first attempts. I also done functional side trips like a Groovy take on Y-combinator.

More recent blogs were more and more focused on Haskell. I have stopped contributing to this blog in 2017. There are many excellent Haskell blogs out there already.

Looking at stats for these blogs was a very interesting exercise. The stats for FP posts were very poor. The difference in number of views between my posts related to mainstream Groovy/Grails and my posts related to functional programming was 10X or bigger. Functional programming remains a niche part within the programming profession. Any estimates I have seen about mainstream vs functional programming jobs show FP to be less than 1% of job market. I believe spamming bots and accidental hits were the reasons why I have seen only a 10X reduction in number of viewer visits. Whatever the actual stats were, the small viewership contributed to my decision to stop blogging.

Playing with code is so much more fun that writing about it. But I still settled on a hybrid. I switched to literate Haskell programs and deployed these as wiki pages on my github projects:
Milewski’s Category Theory for Programmers notes
Idris TTD book notes.
These seemed better than blog to me. The wiki introduction to my CTFP notes ended up copied on the old blog site Why read CPFP? but it was just a pandoc copy of the corresponding wiki page.

I still have occasional need to vent my technical thoughts and concerns. For this reason I decided to move my blog here, closer to my github pet projects.