71–80 of 165 posts
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Good guess.
As an Icelander, I must surely ask what pushed you to use Icelandic as an example. :)
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http://paulgraham.com/core.html
Super-duper. I'm not going to use Arc for anything serious until essential libraries are in place.
Arc is already capable of supporting some subset of applications that are serious in your sense. News.YC is at least moderately serious in that sense.
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What kind of site does it make YC if this is how to get karma?
there is a very different pattern of karma for comments in "big" threads.
Edit: heh, "thanks grandma" has even more than that.
Edit: btw it's funny that i'm still being upmodded
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Well, not quite. I gave Patrick an early version of the code, a couple weeks before Arc was released, and he immediately sent me this fix. I just didn't get around to incorporating it till now. There's a difference between things I don't care about, and things I'm actively against. I don't care about character sets and css, so those things will no doubt gradually get better. Classic static typing, however, I think is…
I don't understand why CSS or HTML are being mentioned during the design of Arc. These seem like library issues and your announcement of Arc was spoiled IMHO by the "rant" about HTML and tables. This is only made worse by the Arc Challenge which seems to be more about the design of libraries for HTML/HTTP etc. than the language. What am I missing?
It was a pretty odd situation to be in. If I'd been releasing Arc into a neutral environment, I probably would have said what I wrote in http://paulgraham.com/core.html. But maybe it's just as well I gave all the flames something to expend themselves on before talking about subtler questions.
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Super-duper. I'm not going to use Arc for anything serious until essential libraries are in place.
Different people have different ideas of serious. To me, exploratory programming is fairly serious, because that's the kind of programming that generates ideas. Arc is already capable of supporting some subset of applications that are serious in your sense. News.YC is at least moderately serious in that sense.
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Well, not quite. I gave Patrick an early version of the code, a couple weeks before Arc was released, and he immediately sent me this fix. I just didn't get around to incorporating it till now. There's a difference between things I don't care about, and things I'm actively against. I don't care about character sets and css, so those things will no doubt gradually get better. Classic static typing, however, I think is…
By "Classic static typing", do you mean C++/Java-style static typing, or does it include Haskell/ML-style type inference as well?
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Well, not quite. I gave Patrick an early version of the code, a couple weeks before Arc was released, and he immediately sent me this fix. I just didn't get around to incorporating it till now. There's a difference between things I don't care about, and things I'm actively against. I don't care about character sets and css, so those things will no doubt gradually get better. Classic static typing, however, I think is…
It's not true that static typing always makes languages weaker. It makes map more powerful, for example: the desired type of output sequence can be inferred rather than having to supply a first argument of the same type like in Arc. I used to agree with you, by the way -- static typing in most languages feels like a straight-jacket. ML wasn't enough to change my mind. It took Haskell.
Do I understand correctly that Arc strings are sequences of octets? If so: I really don't want to be a negativity guy but it seems like every language that has made an 8-bit string the default string type has regretted it later because it is so painful to change it without breaking code. Okay, Paul says that he won't mind breaking code. Maybe he means it, but it doesn't make any sense to me to knowingly and conscious…
Could you offer a better solution? What would your solution offer that octets do not? Random character access? No, because not a single unicode encoding offers easy random character access (because they are made of possibly several codepoints, which, in some encodings, are made of more than one basic "chars"). Gylph, word and sentence segmentation? I guess not.
If you treat strings as octets OTOH even simple operations like concatenating two strings might lead to headache if the strings are in two different encodings. And how do you keep track of the encodings of individual strings? Madness lies down that road.