My guess is it will be back. Just a hunch based on watching similar things happen. This post will likely result in it coming back sooner and/or having a better plan for staying up in the future. Upvote it please!
Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
#22I haven't visited for a while but for the last couple years I thought that even for the usually low, but high quality, post frequency for it the site seemed to have slowed down to unusually low posting frequency. Sad to see it go but it might just have self died.
Maybe they cancelled their Wix subscription...
(kidding)
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
#23A lot of different stuff: The language wars largely ended, with the more popular languages folding in a lot of the more (at the time) esoteric features. DSLs have fallen out of favor. Javascript took over for a bit (although I believe that is receding.) LtU was a great place for about a decade when the internet was getting going, moving language discussions out of the mailing lists, which were pretty isolated, and in…
This seems like a bit of a strange take to me.
LTU was hardly about DSLs or even particular languages, though of course that came up on and off. It was fundamentally a place with discussions on PL theory and related stuff, with the front page being predominantly about current papers. So, the success of Javascript/drop in DSL popularity seem like a strange reason for LTU to stop being useful.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
#24A lot of different stuff: The language wars largely ended, with the more popular languages folding in a lot of the more (at the time) esoteric features. DSLs have fallen out of favor. Javascript took over for a bit (although I believe that is receding.) LtU was a great place for about a decade when the internet was getting going, moving language discussions out of the mailing lists, which were pretty isolated, and in…
I'm not familiar with the OP content but curious about DSLs in web dev. Is there a whole ecosystem of these that I simply didn't know about? Only one that comes to mind is CoffeeScript but that feels long gone at this point. Going to read about your Hyperscript which sounds interesting
JSX seems like a pretty common and significant DSL used in JS.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
#25A lot of different stuff: The language wars largely ended, with the more popular languages folding in a lot of the more (at the time) esoteric features. DSLs have fallen out of favor. Javascript took over for a bit (although I believe that is receding.) LtU was a great place for about a decade when the internet was getting going, moving language discussions out of the mailing lists, which were pretty isolated, and in…
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Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
#26A lot of different stuff: The language wars largely ended, with the more popular languages folding in a lot of the more (at the time) esoteric features. DSLs have fallen out of favor. Javascript took over for a bit (although I believe that is receding.) LtU was a great place for about a decade when the internet was getting going, moving language discussions out of the mailing lists, which were pretty isolated, and in…
This seems like a bit of a strange take to me. LTU was hardly about DSLs or even particular languages, though of course that came up on and off. It was fundamentally a place with discussions on PL theory and related stuff, with the front page being predominantly about current papers. So, the success of Javascript/drop in DSL popularity seem like a strange reason for LTU to stop being useful.
Perhaps it is a strange take, but LtU seemed a lot more relevant to programming in general earlier in the millenia when the programming language question was less settled. From what I remember the really hot discussions were around things like closures, generic programming, dynamic typing, etc. Lots of new and potentially relevant languages were emerging so there was just more tumult in general, and a lot more interest in language features amongst generalists.
Perhaps my biases though: maybe there was some other reason why LtU ended up getting a lot quieter.
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The language wars largely ended, with the more popular languages folding in a lot of the more (at the time) esoteric features. > DSLs have fallen out of favor. External DSLs have largely fallen out of favor, in a large part because the “esoteric features” that have been widely adopted include those that enable very expressive internal DSLs.
It is no fun writing external DSLs when you're stuck with your grandfather's parser generator. If we had grammars that were really extensible (add "unless(X)" equivalent to "if(!X)" in Java's grammar with a few lines of code) and composable (stick a SQL statement into a Java program with just a few lines of code if you have the SQL and Java grammars) and reversible (turn the AST tree back to source code) it would be…
>It is no fun writing external DSLs when you're stuck with your grandfather's parser generator.
Agreed. I've tried various different approaches to building external DSLs, from fully hand-written to language workbenches like xtext [0] and spoofax [1]. I always end up back at hand written, often because of error handling. Creating meaningfully helpful error handling with parser generators always seems hard.
>If we had grammars that were really extensible
Grammar composition is hard. Canonical BNF is top down, meaning alternate clauses are complete and closed in most parser generators. One notable exception is SF3[2] (part of Spoofax). It doesn't require alternate clauses to be grouped and so can support composable languages. It's the most flexible parser-generator I've used, and the syntax is pretty nice too.
Fun fact: SDF3 and Spoofax come from Eelco Visser's group at TU-Delft - the same group that originated Scope Graphs, the basis for Github's Stack Graphs [3].
[0] http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/ [1] https://www.spoofax.dev/ [2] https://eelcovisser.org/publications/2020/AmorimV20.pdf [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29500602
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
#28This is sad because it was a great resource and seemed to have a nice community at one point. I'm surprised by comments saying the language wars are over because I'm not sure this is what the site was about. Programming language design is as interesting as it ever was and no truly mainstream language I'm aware of has well defined formal semantics. There's a lot left to do!
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
#29You can fetch it from here: https://web.archive.org/web/*/lambda-the-ultimate.org
Last good one is
https://web.archive.org/web/20220318053046/http://lambda-the...
First bad one is
https://web.archive.org/web/20220407012041/http://lambda-the...
Re: Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
#30My guess is it will be back. Just a hunch based on watching similar things happen. This post will likely result in it coming back sooner and/or having a better plan for staying up in the future. Upvote it please!
> My guess is it will be back.
Even if it's propped back up, having been extremely quiet for a prolonged period, and then conspicuously broken could pretty reasonably be expected to push participants to a different venue, don't you think?