Viewing profile — pg

In earlier drafts I wrote "the existence of some set of best essays follows necessarily" but it sounded so pedantic that it didn't seem worth keeping just to protect myself from be…

It's not available yet. And in any case if this is the future there should be multiple companies doing it, not just Apple.

Thanks, but as I learned when I was running HN, being a regular user of a forum (which the moderator necessarily is) and writing essays are fundamentally incompatible. If you're kn…

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plu…

Yes. The root of the problem is that the hospitals' supply chain is brittle, and broke under the stress. One hopes it will get redesigned to be more robust. But in the meantime Fle…

This looks pretty good. The only thing I don't like is the coloring of tokens in the examples. It doesn't make them easier to read; it's just distracting.

As names, car and cdr are great: short, and just the right visual distance apart. The only argument against them is that they're not mnemonic. But (a) more mnemonic names tend to b…

This was something I'd meant to do for a long time, and wanting to work on it was one of the reasons I retired from YC. Being overtly ambitious would have provoked haters, but few …

It would not be clearer to use 1 instead of car when you were using a pair to represent a tree, rather than a list, and you were traversing the left and right branches using car an…

An infinite number, in theory. Even (sign n d) does, since you can have anything in d.

What this (def typecheck ((var f) arg env s r m) (mev (cons (list (list f (list 'quote arg)) env) (fu (s r m) (if (car r) (pass var arg env s (cdr r) m) (sigerr 'mistype s r m))) s…

You wouldn't learn much more from reading it, because (to an almost comical extent in retrospect) the internal code was just like HN. In fact, not just like; it was mostly the same…

One answer to this question (and an exciting idea in itself) is that the difference between conciseness and many of these apparently unrelated matters approaches zero. E.g. that al…

It's still the case. bel.bel is generated by software. Most of the actual code is Arc that I turn into Bel in generating it. E.g. the interpreter and anything called by it, and the…

Initially I would have preferred that. I did it that way in Arc. But since functions are lists in Bel, I couldn't do that, or you wouldn't be able to call a function on a number. A…

I don't expect implementations to be compliant. Starting with an initial phase where you care just about the concepts and not at all about efficient implementation almost guarantee…

(where (cadr x)) would be ((b c) a). where tells you what to set, and setting the cadr of (a b c) means setting the car of (b c).

In the same way it's an improvement over other Lisp dialects. There's no huge hole in Arc that Bel fixes. Just a lot of things that are weaker or more awkward or more complicated t…

I talk about this in the first section of the The Bel Language: http://paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/bellanguage.txt

Because falsity is also the empty list.

Numbers are represented using pairs. Specifically (lit num (sign n d) (sign n d)) where the first (sign n d) is the real component and the second the imaginary component. A sign is…

That was once true, but it's all been rewritten.