What's happening with Arc? • Hacker News Board

Re: What's happening with Arc?

#51

Post by hasenj » Wed, Oct 27, 2010, 9:07 AM UTC

SiVal wrote: post #46

pg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My goal from the beginning was to continue where JMC left off: to continue building Lisp up from axioms till I have a more complete language. I've compromised a bit to make it something runnable, which I think you need in order to test out your ideas on programs of substantial length. But "practical programming" is not in itself the main goal. Paradoxical as it sounds, that may be the way to end up with the best lang…

"Axioms" has a nice, mathy ring of solidity to it, but I'm pretty sure that, along with the axioms you are analyzing there are others you are barely thinking about but which also form the foundation of Arc. For example, the notion of code and data being the same in Lisp: strings of text. Is that an axiom? That's certainly one of the keys to the unusual power and flexibility of Lisp. Yet text data these days is a very…

What you talk about regarding unicode for example is just an implementation detail. Unicode strings fundamentally are a list of unicode code points.

UTF-8 is just one of the possible encodings of such list. It can be decoded and converted to UTF-32 before it goes to the reader/lexer.

Re: What's happening with Arc?

#52

Post by SiVal » Wed, Oct 27, 2010, 10:44 AM UTC

hasenj wrote: post #51

SiVal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Axioms" has a nice, mathy ring of solidity to it, but I'm pretty sure that, along with the axioms you are analyzing there are others you are barely thinking about but which also form the foundation of Arc. For example, the notion of code and data being the same in Lisp: strings of text. Is that an axiom? That's certainly one of the keys to the unusual power and flexibility of Lisp. Yet text data these days is a very…

What you talk about regarding unicode for example is just an implementation detail. Unicode strings fundamentally are a list of unicode code points. UTF-8 is just one of the possible encodings of such list. It can be decoded and converted to UTF-32 before it goes to the reader/lexer.

No, it's not "just an implementation detail". I don't want to get into the details here, but your assumption that having your strings in one encoding composed conceptually of code points in a different encoding is not necessarily the way to go. I was on a JCP expert committee that rejected that option for Java, but that doesn't mean it couldn't end up best for Arc. It's just not as easy a decision as you imply. There are alternative approaches with different pros and cons, and since these abstractions all leak, you need to make a cross-implementation decision so that you don't end up with different coding practices on different platforms. Plus all the other issues that Unicode presents that make parsing a challenge that might have implications for a language that is famous for parsing and rewriting its own source at runtime.... These could all be worked out through a vigorous discussion process among a diverse group large enough to make sure that the implications of each approach are understood, but Graham doesn't work that way.

Re: What's happening with Arc?

#53

Post by hasenj » Wed, Oct 27, 2010, 2:21 PM UTC

nadam wrote: post #40

hasenj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, Java does suck! I prefer a utopia where we don't need to write horrible complicated enterprise applications. They're not fun anyway. The enterprises don't have a clue what they need anyway, I bet python can replace Java in all enterprise applications and do a better job, but the managers are too thick headed to accept anything unless it's mainstream and backed by a mega corporation.

Python is a better language than Java overall, but Java has some advantages over Python: because of static typing it is faster and has a very good IDE support. (autocomplete, code navigation, refactoring, etc...) In my eyes the most superior languages have static typing with a clever type inference, so that the code remains concise despite static typing. I like Scala because it really has the best of all worlds. (Alt…

It's the other way around. Java has good IDE support because it's too annoying to write Java applications without an IDE. Java needs IDE support.

On the other hand, python is so pleasant you can develop big applications without any IDE support, just good old vim with ctrl-p word completion.

Re: What's happening with Arc?

#54

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 27, 2010, 8:10 PM UTC

evanrmurphy wrote: post #8

ygd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been meaning to check it out, but the barrier of entry has been too high (likely due to my laziness). IMO: an installer would be a good idea, availability on aptitude would be the best.

5 shell commands to install and run Arc using aptitude: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833416

[deleted]