3 ms·

Ask PG: HN Outage

• pg 17y ago
  I restarted it after changing some code. It takes about a minute to restart. I'm surprised you haven't seen this before, since HN gets restarted every couple days.
  • kgermino 17y ago
    Interesting, and no I've never noticed. I guess I've just been lucky or something. Thanks!
  • cperciva 17y ago
    Why did you restart the server? I thought one of the points of arc was that it allowed you to change the code without restarting.
    • pg 17y ago
      I do that for small changes and to test stuff, but when you're copying and pasting code into the repl it would be easy for the code in memory to diverge from the code on disk. Plus there are certain things that happen at startup, and if you typed code into the repl that broke one of these, you wouldn't know.
      • _delirium 17y ago
        > when you're copying and pasting code into the repl it would be easy for the code in memory to diverge from the code on disk Ah, I take it you're not a fan of the old Lisp/Smalltalk approach of image-oriented development, where tweaking the running system is the canonical version of the code? (Apologies if one of your essays already covers your views on that; I don't remember it being mentioned, and a quick search didn't turn up anything.)
        • mahmud 17y ago
          No Lisper that I know of is a fan of image-oriented development. And copying core-files across the network does not help your down-time issue; you still have to restart under the new core.
          • _delirium 17y ago
            > No Lisper that I know of is a fan of image-oriented development A lot of the lisp-machine veterans are, but I agree most current lispers aren't. One reason, though, might be that no recent Lisp actually provides a good environment for image-oriented development (the facilities for inspecting/manipulating the running image are a lot clunkier than those in, say, Squeak).
            • deleted 17y ago
              [deleted]
        • pg 17y ago
          No, I've never liked that Smalltalkish idea of storing programs one function at a time. You lose information that way. I prefer to view programs as text. A text file is actually a very cool and underrated abstraction. It's not hard to imagine someone reinventing it as an advanced version of the Smalltalk approach: add the ability to view multiple definitions in some predefined order, add control over indentation (no small thing), add the ability to intersperse comments between the definitions, and bingo, you've reinvented the text file.
          • s-phi-nl 17y ago
            Cincom Smalltalk's Web Velocity seems to have something like what you describe. See http://vimeo.com/groups/webvelocity/videos/6156626 http://vimeo.com/groups/webvelocity/videos/6156626 at about 1:17