6 ms·

Thank you pg and rtm

84 points by pogos 17y ago

mahmud 17y ago
and now for the anti-pandering anti-pattern ;-) I can not believe for once that this guy obtained hacking nirvana through Arc. Not once! Why? because the Arc documentation is so meager as to be non-existent. You will need serious feet-wetting with more established Lisp dialects before you can "get there" with Arc. All the epiphanies he lists are easily experienced with most modern Lisp dialects; either he "got it" before and just needed to extend the credit to Arc, for some reason .. or he isn't there yet, at least not to its full potential. It had to be said, as much as I hate to be rude and blunt like this :-|
- icey 17y ago
  This is why I stopped reading C.L.L. - The notion that it's inconceivable to genuinely like any other language than Common Lisp. It's a bizarre idea, and one that carries much more fervor than I think CL has earned. If this were still 1990, then I suppose it would have a stronger leg to stand on.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    I haven't mentioned Common Lisp by name, and if it makes you feel any better, every CLer has a pet-Lisp trapped inside him, including yours truly ;-)
    - icey 17y ago
      Don't get me wrong, I really like Common Lisp (well, all I've ever played with is SBCL, so maybe I would like another variant more or less). I just don't see why it's impossible for someone to actually like Arc, or Clojure, or PLT Scheme or any other little-L lisp instead of Common Lisp.
      - mahmud 17y ago
        Those are all "modern lisp dialects", none of my tone or phrasing suggested CL-centrism. Please re-read. I hope any pre-conceived notion of Lisper hostility isn't getting in the way you read my prose above. Demand for rigor in thought shouldn't be mistaken for hostility.
        deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- CatDancer 17y ago
  I have achieved hacking nirvana through Arc because I like Arc more than I like Scheme or Common Lisp.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    So it's a personal-preference choice made after sufficient deliberation and experience in all the options on the table, I hope. Ok. I will accept that. Here is my take on your personal essay, it's also a matter of personal opinion made after sufficient technical evaluation of the matter: I think you need to be a little more critical of your own reasoning, specially when writing for programmers. The spirit of your essay has been largely positive, IMO, but go easy on the snide remarks and the dismissive attitude of other technologies you have very little experience in (yeah, it shows.) Otherwise a much less sympathetic reader than I, and a far more competent one, will come aboard and tear your argument to pieces. A better way to frame your enthusiastic writing would be "I can do X in Arc, I really wish ${LISP_DIALECT} would let me do the same". This is both curious and also accepting of one's own self-limitations. Someone will come aboard and show you what you have been missing, and you might as well get pointers to the literature that further your understanding of Arc or whatever other technology. Regards.
    - CatDancer 17y ago
      Can you give me an example of a snide remark that could be rewritten? (I appreciate your suggestion to say that I wish another Lisp dialect was more like Arc, but I'm not sure how I'd choose one since I don't really have a favorite aside from Arc).
      - mahmud 17y ago
        > Can you give me an example of a snide remark that could be rewritten? Here is a quick list of what I think needs further deliberation and scrutiny on your part. > I’ve long liked Lisp, but hadn’t been programming in Lisp for a long time because I hadn’t found any features in Lisp compelling enough to overcome the advantage other languages had in having large libraries available and such like. [You came to the wrong Lisp then, as Arc has no libraries compared to all the mainstream lisp dialects] > I found the [Scheme] rationale of hygienic macros -- avoiding all possibility of conflicting identifiers in macro expansions -- to be compelling. After all, who would want to write a macro that breaks just because the user happens to be using a variable of the same name as one used in the macro? [Actually, scheme's hygienic macros shift the burden of capture-avoidance to the compiler. It's CL that has to use gensym.] >I now understand that all these language features that people work hard to create solve some problem, and it can be a useful and important problem to solve, and yet it can be a problem I don’t care about, a problem I don’t have. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad language feature, but it can make it one that I don’t want to pay the cost of using. [This is fraught with reasoning errors. If you want a language that only has the features you want, create your own DSL. And even after that, you might apply that a la carte reasoning to the runtime and question why you might need a certain garbage collector, if any at all, or why you might need your runtime to have bindings for the OS system calls when you don't use them. Slippery slope. Richness is usually a good thing, not bad.] >Yet in Java, it’s hard to get anything shorter than ten or twenty lines of code. See some code duplication, and by the time you’ve written the classes and interfaces and methods you need to write to remove the duplication, the code is just as long as it was before. [A personal opinion that will send java programmers in uproar. not that java doesn't suck ;-] >Languages written by hackers for hackers like Perl and Ruby and Python are lots better (and, I find for myself, a lot more productive for me for the kinds of projects I work on), and I can write shorter programs in them, yet they don’t help me go further [and now the Perl, Python and Ruby programmers feel trolled and will jump at your neck. You requirements are of the DWIM kind.] >they don’t help me make my program shorter. [Yes, and an Aston Martin can't tow a boat. Right tool for the job] >Now I see some pattern in my code, if I’m doing more typing than I want to be doing, BAM I write a macro and use it. Just like that [and the Lisp programmer collective is surprised by your surprise.] and so on and so forth.
- tspiteri 17y ago
  He does say that he has long liked Lisp, and that he generally liked Scheme, so he already had his feet wet. And although the documentation is, well, scarce, he did read through the source code file arc.arc.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    Read what he wrote again and you will be surprised by the logic: "I’ve long liked Lisp, but hadn’t been programming in Lisp for a long time because I hadn’t found any features in Lisp compelling enough to overcome the advantage other languages had in having large libraries available and such like." I mean, come ON. If Lisp wasn't compelling enough because of the perceived lack of libraries, then Arc is the last way to come back to Lisp as it has NIL. It's completely acceptable to have a preferred Lisp, but it's unacceptable to do so for irrational reasons ;-) Every time you need a new library/feature in Arc you're most likely to call out to the MzScheme runtime and FFI. It's highly hypocritical of you to dismiss a language for lack of libraries, then jump on another language it hosts.
    - CatDancer 17y ago
      For me it's a cost/benefit analysis. Programming in MzScheme or Arc has a cost to me in that the libraries I typically use for my projects are mostly available in other languages, so they are harder to get to. I may decide to program in a language despite such a cost if it has other benefits for me that I find outweigh the cost. While I liked MzScheme, I didn't find its benefit to me great enough to outweigh the inconvenience of the library issue. The scale tipped in the other direction for me with Arc, where I'm happy enough with the benefits I find in Arc that they outweigh the other disadvantages for me.
      - mahmud 17y ago
        Your article doesn't list any of the library features that tipped the scale in favor of Arc. It's unfair to the MzScheme developers and users to dismiss their platform without telling them what's lacking. Please revise the article and flesh it further, if you have the time, because as it stands, it doesn't stand well under scrutiny. Public technical rationales aught to be a little more than "just cuz" and personal preference. If you wanted a discussion that is ..
- comatose_kid 17y ago
  I don't know about 'hacking nirvana', but I found the Arc tutorial coupled with help from an appropriate newsgroup to grok macros (#arc? I don't remember now) was enough to write a ray tracer (LightMakesRight in the anarki distribution). Arc was my first exposure to a lisp dialect.
- pg 17y ago
  I have a lot of experience with Arc, Scheme, and Common Lisp, and I find Arc significantly more pleasant to program in. When I have to shift into Scheme (some parts of Arc are written in Scheme), it feels like there is a lot of extra drag. It was noticing this difference that made me decide Arc was ready to release. If it (a) felt significantly better to me, who (b) am experienced with existing Lisp dialects, and (c) writing a type of application (HN) that's not wildly specialized, then it had the "quantum of utility" I usually use as the test for releasing a version 1.
  - gsharm 17y ago
    Hi Paul, Any chance of releasing a book or spec alongside Arc at some point? Or are you encouraging people to just play around with it for now? I'm just wondering whether the idea here is to encourage exploration through scarcity, or that there's insufficient resources to produce the documentation, or if it's just too early on at this stage.
    - pg 17y ago
      That's one of the things I'm going to do next.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    Paul, you're fit to prefer Arc over the rest because: 1) you're an experienced Lisper, and 2) it's your own creation, you know it inside and out and the language spec, manual, tutorial and research papers are somewhere between your ears (the most convenient type of bookshelf ;-) However, it's IMO, unacceptable for a fairly new Lisp programmer to cast aside 50 years of Lisp research, development and deployment while brushing aside the industry's backbone languages, and herald Arc as the best thing ever when it isn't even finished. I can accept personal choice and opinion, if kept to one's self and made in private. Even if someone sings Arc, or Clojure or Common Lisp or Scheme, praises, I am fine with it. But to say "Languages X, Y, Z suck because they don't allow me to write succinct programs", well, you're just trolling for X, Y and Z programmers to come out and straighten you out. The sort of macrology he is after (code-compacting type, not language extension) is pretty basic and could be done with the C pre-processor and M4. You can even write compact assembly programs with GASP, HLA, and NASM macros; it's not rocket science. I reserve my judgment for Arc until it's done. There is no manual yet to hold the compiler accountable, and to save me from guess-work. However, what I can't ignore is blind fanboyism; if everybody here sang Arc praises, when it is just arc-tutorial.txt and arc.arc, and there were no "dissenting" honest voices, well, the place just wouldn't be the same.
- Take2 17y ago
  > It had to be said, as much as I hate to be rude and blunt like this Actually it didn't, but that hasn't stopped you before;
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- Xichekolas 17y ago
  The guy expressed an opinion... this isn't a Draft Proposal For The Official Unanimous Worldwide Opinion On The Best Programming Language Ever And For All Time. I can summarize the whole thing as: "I really like working with arc, and it makes me happy enough to blog about it." So yeah, while I didn't find it particularly worth upvoting, I'm not sure why you are trying to convince this guy he is somehow _wrong_ about being happy, and telling him he shouldn't dare write about it. You can no more do that than convince someone who claims their favorite color is red that it is in fact blue.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    I will be the first to admit that this has been an unnecessary verbal body-slam on my part and I do owe the poster an apology, but: > The guy expressed an opinion... In technical circles even opinions have to be defensible. You can't just accept "X sucks and Y rocks" as an opinion and let it pass. The whole place will become abuzz with irrational thought, and overrun with "we are all right" group-think liberal-arts type BS.
    - Xichekolas 17y ago
      > You can't just accept "X sucks and Y rocks" as an opinion and let it pass. Why not? The only reason that 'the whole place will become abuzz with irrational thought, and overrun with "we are all right" group-think liberal-arts type BS' is because people can't just accept things like this as somebody's opinion... they have to create a language war out of simple blog post about liking something. (To everyone else, I'll quit now I promise, obviously I'm not helping the matter!)
    - fuioqeurpo 17y ago
      s/verbal body-slam/public demonstration that I am an absolute tool/
- cubicle67 17y ago
  I see CatDancer's touched a bit of a raw nerve. You've been compelled to respond with about a dozen (didn't count them) posts all quite attacking of both CatDancer and Arc. What the hell is your problem with a) someone creating their own Lisp implementation, and b) someone else enjoying using it?
  - mahmud 17y ago
    you wouldn't understand it, and it's not a personal problem of mine: just consider my behavior in this discussion a throw-back to a long-dead form of communication from when programmers where held accountable to their words :-) I should have been nice, we're all equally-right in some way. hugs.
axod 17y ago
>> "The second half of the book is how to apply the principles to Java code. Which is horrendous! Not the book. If you should be so unfortunate to be stuck trying to write good code in Java, the book is a great, lucid description of how to do so. Yet in Java, it’s hard to get anything shorter than ten or twenty lines of code. See some code duplication, and by the time you’ve written the classes and interfaces and methods you need to write to remove the duplication, the code is just as long as it was before." Yeah you're doing something wrong there. I know it's fashionable to bash Java and say how lame and verbose it is, but it does wear a bit thin. I actually enjoy writing Java. Perhaps due to me having grown up programming assembly - I don't mind verbosity. Java is an extremely solid fast language.
- jimbokun 17y ago
  And a big part of the value proposition of Clojure is that it gives you Lisp's ability to eliminate almost all duplication with macros alongside most of the benefits of Java.
- abstractbill 17y ago
  Java is an extremely solid fast language. You mean "the JVM is an extremely solid fast runtime" - languages by themselves aren't fast or slow ;-)
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - axod 17y ago
    Right - Java as a word is heavily overloaded ;). For me, that's the bit that matters - the JVM. Java is just something I use because it's easier than writing bytecode :/ Java as a language, the syntax, is for me sane. It gets a lot of things right, and some things wrong, but on balance, it's sane enough to use. Just like English as a language is sane enough to use, whilst having lots of stupid inconsistencies in spelling/pronunciation etc. And it's likely to be the fastest/most optimized of any JVM target language.
- CatDancer 17y ago
jmatt 17y ago
If we're going to be thanking people... Thanks Anarki and arcfn.com!* They were both tremendously useful/helpful when I last used arc. *All creators and contributors.
jcl 17y ago
I'd love to hear what the difference is between arc macros and scheme hygenic macros that makes one effortless and the other unhelpful.
- abstractbill 17y ago
  I haven't used arc in a while, but if I remember correctly it has a Common Lisp style defmacro that anyone can figure out: (defmacro foo (args go here) `(code goes ,here)) On the other hand, Scheme has this monstrosity for defining macros that I can't describe because I never managed to keep straight in my head how it was supposed to work. Hygiene is a red-herring. It's easy enough to achieve with a defmacro-style macro system - just use gensyms.
  - jjs 17y ago
    > Hygiene is a red-herring. It's easy enough to achieve with a defmacro-style macro system - just use gensyms. Hygiene can also be baked-in to a nice lispy defmacro-style system; there's no reason that hygienic macros have to be scheme-style. Variable capture can be permitted with a (capture x) special form. (I like to use ^x as a shorthand for that). At that point, macros start behaving scope-wise similarly to lexical functions, and captured variables behave kind of like dynamic variables in a function. It suddenly occurs to me that this form of hygiene could be implemented in the expansion of let, lambda and defun forms, at which point (someone yell at me please if I'm wrong), plain-ol' defmacros would be hygienic, unless there's a type of variable capture that I'm forgetting about right now...
  - shiro 17y ago
    Ah, this has been repeated many times, but I can't help to click "reply"... > It's easy enough to achieve with a defmacro-style macro system - just use gensyms. Gensym cannot prevent global identifiers from being shadowed in macro use environment. (define-macro (my-if a b c) `(if ,a ,b ,c)) (define (boo) (let ((if list)) ; if is shadowed (my-if 'x 'y 'z))) ; evaluates to (x y z), not y In CL you don't need to worry much, since (a) it is Lisp-2 so variables won't shadow operators, and (b) using packages greatly reduces accidental shadowing. In Scheme the chance is much higher; you probably don't bind 'if' locally, but you can't check every user-defined global procedures the macro inserts into the output.
markessien 17y ago
I understand what the guy is saying, but this is equivalent to art students discussing the technicality and construction of canvases. Even if you select the best canvas in the world, it does not make your painting better. I think that too much of writing about programming is focused on the details of the programming act, and too little on the result of the programming. Reading about finding and learning a programming language is like reading about an artist choosing a brush. Reading about the technical details of someone scaling a Django app on a single server to serve 1000 concurrent requests per second is like seeing the finished artwork.
- anc2020 17y ago
  > Reading about finding and learning a programming language is like reading about an artist choosing a brush. Wands are a much better metaphor to make. Or perhaps, what if you had a magic brush that could at any time be extremely fine or large or anywhere in between depending on how you felt? That would be some brush, especially when you compare it to the many medium sized brushes which aren't so fine when you need them to be. Okay, so maybe the metaphor is still stretching a bit, but these are no ordinary brushes; they are worth writing about.
wingo 17y ago
It's funny, just today I finished up some work merging a hygienic expander into the core of Guile. I've been writing defmacros for a few years now, and while things are not all lovely in the world of syntax-rules or syntax-case, it is so much more lovely to write a macro that you know catches the important cases, and that will compose well with other code, and /especially/ code from other modules. That said, have fun with Arc ;-)
stcredzero 17y ago
From what this guy is saying, the power of Lisp style Macros is akin to what I can do with the syntactic Rewrite Tool and Blocks (Lambdas) in Smalltalk. I've always been led to believe that Lisp Macros are something even more powerful. (I haven't had the time to really delve into them.)
- jimbokun 17y ago
  Yes, there was a recent article on HN about "your language features are my libraries." http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/05/20/your-language-features-are-my-libraries/ http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/05/20/your-language-features-... That was comparing Smalltalk to C#, but it is a similar idea. Smalltalk and Lisp belong to that elite fraternity of programming languages where the ability to easily extend the syntax is built into the language. The mechanisms are different, but the expressive power is similar.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Well, I've heard that Blocks get you most of the way to Macros, but not quite. I'm wondering if the "not quite" part is something beyond what's afforded by the Rewrite Tool. The Rewrite Tool is not dynamic. Perhaps this is the key? But I could imagine a Smalltalk function that takes a method, applies a Rewrite Tool syntactic transformation to its source, compiles the method as a Block, then calls this Block with the arguments that would've been send to the original method. Something like: perform: methodName with: arguments rewriting: aMatchingPattern as: aRewritePattern Where aMatchingPattern would be something like: ``@rcv ifTrue: `Block1 ifFalse: `Block2 Then aRewritePattern could be something like: "Order of Blocks reversed" ``@rcv ifTrue: `Block2 ifFalse: `Block1 Just be careful to cache the result of the compilation by method name and Class, and this wouldn't be too much slower than a conventional #perform: This particular example would let you dynamically call any method, but with all of the if-then-else equivalents with the then and else clauses swapped. Would this constitute Smalltalk Macros?
    - jimbokun 17y ago
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
pg 17y ago
We're releasing a new version quite soon. So once again, if there's anything you want fixed, now is the time to tell us. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=9257 http://arclanguage.org/item?id=9257 One of the things I want to add next is graphics libraries. Does anyone have any recommendations for what to plug into to munge images?
- crescendo 17y ago
  Does anyone have any recommendations for what to plug into to munge images? ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/ http://www.imagemagick.org/) has worked well for us. There are bindings out there for many languages, including Common Lisp (http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-magick/ http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-magick/); you might want to look there for inspiration.
  - pg 17y ago
    We used ImageMagick to manipulate images in Viaweb. So if it's still the best thing around now, 14 years later, it must be pretty good. Thanks!
- gills 17y ago
  ImageMagick? Cairo? OpenGL bindings?
  - mbrubeck 17y ago
    Cairo bindings would be awesome for graphing, vector art, and fancy text (and a nice complement to a bitmap manipulation library like ImageMagick).
- Take2 17y ago
  just out of curiosity where do graphics libraries sit relative to these ? http://arclanguage.org/item?id=4070 http://arclanguage.org/item?id=4070 Are you planning to do another poll ?
- tsally 17y ago
  ++ for OpenGL bindings. OpenGL is one of the more expressive and creative tools someone can use while programming for fun.
CatDancer 17y ago
OK, I have a HN etiquette question. I don't post much on HN, and I wasn't the one who posted the link to my thank-you here on HN. I've had a HN account for a while, but I'm still pretty much a newbie to HN. I have a desire to not just stand here and take it on the chin as mahmud publicly proclaims that I'm pandering, a Lisp newbie, irrational, a blind fanboy, hypocritical, dismissive, and unfair. On the other hand I don't want to waste everyone's time with a tedious flamewar. Thoughts?
- gruseom 17y ago
  Reply once and ignore the rest.
- pg 17y ago
  He was surprisingly nasty about it, but I wouldn't bother fighting back. A lot of the people who voted up his comment didn't do it because they agreed with him so much as because they're worried you'll start a trend of people posting stuff trying to suck up to us. Which is actually a reasonable thing to worry about, considering that a significant number of HN users think they might one day apply to YC. So you were basically just unlucky.
- bitdiddle 17y ago
  It happens to us all I guess, sometimes it's too much coffee too early in the day or someone hits a soft spot. It's easy to misinterpret what people say on the net. FWIW I too had a very positive superficial read of Arc when it was first published and I'm neither a fanboy nor a Lisp newbie. Scheme is one of my true loves.
10ren 17y ago
First I figure out how to do what I need to do, then I translate that into the constructs of the language, then I try it and it doesn’t work, and then I debug or figure it out :-). It's a wonderful thing to have a language that matches how you think, an extension of your mind analogous to how physical tools can be an extension of your body, with a heft, weight and balance that causes them to leap to hand, and guide you at times. But my particular tasks at the moment involve so much more work at the drawing board (the figuring stage) that having better tools doesn't actually help me - much as I would love them to. It's very true that the tools you need depend on your personal way of thinking, the task, the stage of the task, and how many times you've done it.
jpedrosa 17y ago
Hi. My experience lies in Ruby and in JavaScript (these days) so I can see these worlds however close, differently. In Ruby I have all kinds of gimmicks that help with cutting the chase when that's what I want, but I also can make it a little harder when I am interested in something else, in experimenting with some other approach. What I find a little disgusting is when my "meta-programming" in Ruby starts doing things like when an exception occurs, it points to a line number slightly different than where it really is, or when the backtrace becomes all the more "hacked" with harder to understand things thrown in there. It serves to remind us that there are tradeoffs involved. Also there is the issue creating shareable modules and when you start hacking it away it can make it all the more harder to share. But it's more than fun, it does work, it's just that one can have mixed feelings because for ever cool finding or development, there can exist a little nuisance as well or something that you cannot quite do anymore because you deviated from mainstream... I gotta go have lunch! Be well.

84 points by pogos 17y ago

and now for the anti-pandering anti-pattern ;-) I can not believe for once that this guy obtained hacking nirvana through Arc. Not once! Why? because the Arc documentation is so meager as to be non-existent. You will need serious feet-wetting with more established Lisp dialects before you can "get there" with Arc. All the epiphanies he lists are easily experienced with most modern Lisp dialects; either he "got it" before and just needed to extend the credit to Arc, for some reason .. or he isn't there yet, at least not to its full potential. It had to be said, as much as I hate to be rude and blunt like this :-|

icey 17y ago
This is why I stopped reading C.L.L. - The notion that it's inconceivable to genuinely like any other language than Common Lisp. It's a bizarre idea, and one that carries much more fervor than I think CL has earned. If this were still 1990, then I suppose it would have a stronger leg to stand on.
- mahmud 17y ago
  I haven't mentioned Common Lisp by name, and if it makes you feel any better, every CLer has a pet-Lisp trapped inside him, including yours truly ;-)
  - icey 17y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I really like Common Lisp (well, all I've ever played with is SBCL, so maybe I would like another variant more or less). I just don't see why it's impossible for someone to actually like Arc, or Clojure, or PLT Scheme or any other little-L lisp instead of Common Lisp.
    - mahmud 17y ago
      Those are all "modern lisp dialects", none of my tone or phrasing suggested CL-centrism. Please re-read. I hope any pre-conceived notion of Lisper hostility isn't getting in the way you read my prose above. Demand for rigor in thought shouldn't be mistaken for hostility.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
CatDancer 17y ago
I have achieved hacking nirvana through Arc because I like Arc more than I like Scheme or Common Lisp.
- mahmud 17y ago
  So it's a personal-preference choice made after sufficient deliberation and experience in all the options on the table, I hope. Ok. I will accept that. Here is my take on your personal essay, it's also a matter of personal opinion made after sufficient technical evaluation of the matter: I think you need to be a little more critical of your own reasoning, specially when writing for programmers. The spirit of your essay has been largely positive, IMO, but go easy on the snide remarks and the dismissive attitude of other technologies you have very little experience in (yeah, it shows.) Otherwise a much less sympathetic reader than I, and a far more competent one, will come aboard and tear your argument to pieces. A better way to frame your enthusiastic writing would be "I can do X in Arc, I really wish ${LISP_DIALECT} would let me do the same". This is both curious and also accepting of one's own self-limitations. Someone will come aboard and show you what you have been missing, and you might as well get pointers to the literature that further your understanding of Arc or whatever other technology. Regards.
  - CatDancer 17y ago
    Can you give me an example of a snide remark that could be rewritten? (I appreciate your suggestion to say that I wish another Lisp dialect was more like Arc, but I'm not sure how I'd choose one since I don't really have a favorite aside from Arc).
    - mahmud 17y ago
      > Can you give me an example of a snide remark that could be rewritten? Here is a quick list of what I think needs further deliberation and scrutiny on your part. > I’ve long liked Lisp, but hadn’t been programming in Lisp for a long time because I hadn’t found any features in Lisp compelling enough to overcome the advantage other languages had in having large libraries available and such like. [You came to the wrong Lisp then, as Arc has no libraries compared to all the mainstream lisp dialects] > I found the [Scheme] rationale of hygienic macros -- avoiding all possibility of conflicting identifiers in macro expansions -- to be compelling. After all, who would want to write a macro that breaks just because the user happens to be using a variable of the same name as one used in the macro? [Actually, scheme's hygienic macros shift the burden of capture-avoidance to the compiler. It's CL that has to use gensym.] >I now understand that all these language features that people work hard to create solve some problem, and it can be a useful and important problem to solve, and yet it can be a problem I don’t care about, a problem I don’t have. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad language feature, but it can make it one that I don’t want to pay the cost of using. [This is fraught with reasoning errors. If you want a language that only has the features you want, create your own DSL. And even after that, you might apply that a la carte reasoning to the runtime and question why you might need a certain garbage collector, if any at all, or why you might need your runtime to have bindings for the OS system calls when you don't use them. Slippery slope. Richness is usually a good thing, not bad.] >Yet in Java, it’s hard to get anything shorter than ten or twenty lines of code. See some code duplication, and by the time you’ve written the classes and interfaces and methods you need to write to remove the duplication, the code is just as long as it was before. [A personal opinion that will send java programmers in uproar. not that java doesn't suck ;-] >Languages written by hackers for hackers like Perl and Ruby and Python are lots better (and, I find for myself, a lot more productive for me for the kinds of projects I work on), and I can write shorter programs in them, yet they don’t help me go further [and now the Perl, Python and Ruby programmers feel trolled and will jump at your neck. You requirements are of the DWIM kind.] >they don’t help me make my program shorter. [Yes, and an Aston Martin can't tow a boat. Right tool for the job] >Now I see some pattern in my code, if I’m doing more typing than I want to be doing, BAM I write a macro and use it. Just like that [and the Lisp programmer collective is surprised by your surprise.] and so on and so forth.
tspiteri 17y ago
He does say that he has long liked Lisp, and that he generally liked Scheme, so he already had his feet wet. And although the documentation is, well, scarce, he did read through the source code file arc.arc.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Read what he wrote again and you will be surprised by the logic: "I’ve long liked Lisp, but hadn’t been programming in Lisp for a long time because I hadn’t found any features in Lisp compelling enough to overcome the advantage other languages had in having large libraries available and such like." I mean, come ON. If Lisp wasn't compelling enough because of the perceived lack of libraries, then Arc is the last way to come back to Lisp as it has NIL. It's completely acceptable to have a preferred Lisp, but it's unacceptable to do so for irrational reasons ;-) Every time you need a new library/feature in Arc you're most likely to call out to the MzScheme runtime and FFI. It's highly hypocritical of you to dismiss a language for lack of libraries, then jump on another language it hosts.
  - CatDancer 17y ago
    For me it's a cost/benefit analysis. Programming in MzScheme or Arc has a cost to me in that the libraries I typically use for my projects are mostly available in other languages, so they are harder to get to. I may decide to program in a language despite such a cost if it has other benefits for me that I find outweigh the cost. While I liked MzScheme, I didn't find its benefit to me great enough to outweigh the inconvenience of the library issue. The scale tipped in the other direction for me with Arc, where I'm happy enough with the benefits I find in Arc that they outweigh the other disadvantages for me.
    - mahmud 17y ago
      Your article doesn't list any of the library features that tipped the scale in favor of Arc. It's unfair to the MzScheme developers and users to dismiss their platform without telling them what's lacking. Please revise the article and flesh it further, if you have the time, because as it stands, it doesn't stand well under scrutiny. Public technical rationales aught to be a little more than "just cuz" and personal preference. If you wanted a discussion that is ..
comatose_kid 17y ago
I don't know about 'hacking nirvana', but I found the Arc tutorial coupled with help from an appropriate newsgroup to grok macros (#arc? I don't remember now) was enough to write a ray tracer (LightMakesRight in the anarki distribution). Arc was my first exposure to a lisp dialect.
pg 17y ago
I have a lot of experience with Arc, Scheme, and Common Lisp, and I find Arc significantly more pleasant to program in. When I have to shift into Scheme (some parts of Arc are written in Scheme), it feels like there is a lot of extra drag. It was noticing this difference that made me decide Arc was ready to release. If it (a) felt significantly better to me, who (b) am experienced with existing Lisp dialects, and (c) writing a type of application (HN) that's not wildly specialized, then it had the "quantum of utility" I usually use as the test for releasing a version 1.
- gsharm 17y ago
  Hi Paul, Any chance of releasing a book or spec alongside Arc at some point? Or are you encouraging people to just play around with it for now? I'm just wondering whether the idea here is to encourage exploration through scarcity, or that there's insufficient resources to produce the documentation, or if it's just too early on at this stage.
  - pg 17y ago
    That's one of the things I'm going to do next.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Paul, you're fit to prefer Arc over the rest because: 1) you're an experienced Lisper, and 2) it's your own creation, you know it inside and out and the language spec, manual, tutorial and research papers are somewhere between your ears (the most convenient type of bookshelf ;-) However, it's IMO, unacceptable for a fairly new Lisp programmer to cast aside 50 years of Lisp research, development and deployment while brushing aside the industry's backbone languages, and herald Arc as the best thing ever when it isn't even finished. I can accept personal choice and opinion, if kept to one's self and made in private. Even if someone sings Arc, or Clojure or Common Lisp or Scheme, praises, I am fine with it. But to say "Languages X, Y, Z suck because they don't allow me to write succinct programs", well, you're just trolling for X, Y and Z programmers to come out and straighten you out. The sort of macrology he is after (code-compacting type, not language extension) is pretty basic and could be done with the C pre-processor and M4. You can even write compact assembly programs with GASP, HLA, and NASM macros; it's not rocket science. I reserve my judgment for Arc until it's done. There is no manual yet to hold the compiler accountable, and to save me from guess-work. However, what I can't ignore is blind fanboyism; if everybody here sang Arc praises, when it is just arc-tutorial.txt and arc.arc, and there were no "dissenting" honest voices, well, the place just wouldn't be the same.
Take2 17y ago
> It had to be said, as much as I hate to be rude and blunt like this Actually it didn't, but that hasn't stopped you before;
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
Xichekolas 17y ago
The guy expressed an opinion... this isn't a Draft Proposal For The Official Unanimous Worldwide Opinion On The Best Programming Language Ever And For All Time. I can summarize the whole thing as: "I really like working with arc, and it makes me happy enough to blog about it." So yeah, while I didn't find it particularly worth upvoting, I'm not sure why you are trying to convince this guy he is somehow _wrong_ about being happy, and telling him he shouldn't dare write about it. You can no more do that than convince someone who claims their favorite color is red that it is in fact blue.
- mahmud 17y ago
  I will be the first to admit that this has been an unnecessary verbal body-slam on my part and I do owe the poster an apology, but: > The guy expressed an opinion... In technical circles even opinions have to be defensible. You can't just accept "X sucks and Y rocks" as an opinion and let it pass. The whole place will become abuzz with irrational thought, and overrun with "we are all right" group-think liberal-arts type BS.
  - Xichekolas 17y ago
    > You can't just accept "X sucks and Y rocks" as an opinion and let it pass. Why not? The only reason that 'the whole place will become abuzz with irrational thought, and overrun with "we are all right" group-think liberal-arts type BS' is because people can't just accept things like this as somebody's opinion... they have to create a language war out of simple blog post about liking something. (To everyone else, I'll quit now I promise, obviously I'm not helping the matter!)
  - fuioqeurpo 17y ago
    s/verbal body-slam/public demonstration that I am an absolute tool/
cubicle67 17y ago
I see CatDancer's touched a bit of a raw nerve. You've been compelled to respond with about a dozen (didn't count them) posts all quite attacking of both CatDancer and Arc. What the hell is your problem with a) someone creating their own Lisp implementation, and b) someone else enjoying using it?
- mahmud 17y ago
  you wouldn't understand it, and it's not a personal problem of mine: just consider my behavior in this discussion a throw-back to a long-dead form of communication from when programmers where held accountable to their words :-) I should have been nice, we're all equally-right in some way. hugs.

axod 17y ago

>> "The second half of the book is how to apply the principles to Java code. Which is horrendous! Not the book. If you should be so unfortunate to be stuck trying to write good code in Java, the book is a great, lucid description of how to do so. Yet in Java, it’s hard to get anything shorter than ten or twenty lines of code. See some code duplication, and by the time you’ve written the classes and interfaces and methods you need to write to remove the duplication, the code is just as long as it was before." Yeah you're doing something wrong there. I know it's fashionable to bash Java and say how lame and verbose it is, but it does wear a bit thin. I actually enjoy writing Java. Perhaps due to me having grown up programming assembly - I don't mind verbosity. Java is an extremely solid fast language.

jimbokun 17y ago
And a big part of the value proposition of Clojure is that it gives you Lisp's ability to eliminate almost all duplication with macros alongside most of the benefits of Java.
abstractbill 17y ago
Java is an extremely solid fast language. You mean "the JVM is an extremely solid fast runtime" - languages by themselves aren't fast or slow ;-)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- axod 17y ago
  Right - Java as a word is heavily overloaded ;). For me, that's the bit that matters - the JVM. Java is just something I use because it's easier than writing bytecode :/ Java as a language, the syntax, is for me sane. It gets a lot of things right, and some things wrong, but on balance, it's sane enough to use. Just like English as a language is sane enough to use, whilst having lots of stupid inconsistencies in spelling/pronunciation etc. And it's likely to be the fastest/most optimized of any JVM target language.
CatDancer 17y ago

jmatt 17y ago

If we're going to be thanking people... Thanks Anarki and arcfn.com!* They were both tremendously useful/helpful when I last used arc. *All creators and contributors.

jcl 17y ago

I'd love to hear what the difference is between arc macros and scheme hygenic macros that makes one effortless and the other unhelpful.

abstractbill 17y ago
I haven't used arc in a while, but if I remember correctly it has a Common Lisp style defmacro that anyone can figure out: (defmacro foo (args go here) `(code goes ,here)) On the other hand, Scheme has this monstrosity for defining macros that I can't describe because I never managed to keep straight in my head how it was supposed to work. Hygiene is a red-herring. It's easy enough to achieve with a defmacro-style macro system - just use gensyms.
- jjs 17y ago
  > Hygiene is a red-herring. It's easy enough to achieve with a defmacro-style macro system - just use gensyms. Hygiene can also be baked-in to a nice lispy defmacro-style system; there's no reason that hygienic macros have to be scheme-style. Variable capture can be permitted with a (capture x) special form. (I like to use ^x as a shorthand for that). At that point, macros start behaving scope-wise similarly to lexical functions, and captured variables behave kind of like dynamic variables in a function. It suddenly occurs to me that this form of hygiene could be implemented in the expansion of let, lambda and defun forms, at which point (someone yell at me please if I'm wrong), plain-ol' defmacros would be hygienic, unless there's a type of variable capture that I'm forgetting about right now...
- shiro 17y ago
  Ah, this has been repeated many times, but I can't help to click "reply"... > It's easy enough to achieve with a defmacro-style macro system - just use gensyms. Gensym cannot prevent global identifiers from being shadowed in macro use environment. (define-macro (my-if a b c) `(if ,a ,b ,c)) (define (boo) (let ((if list)) ; if is shadowed (my-if 'x 'y 'z))) ; evaluates to (x y z), not y In CL you don't need to worry much, since (a) it is Lisp-2 so variables won't shadow operators, and (b) using packages greatly reduces accidental shadowing. In Scheme the chance is much higher; you probably don't bind 'if' locally, but you can't check every user-defined global procedures the macro inserts into the output.

markessien 17y ago

I understand what the guy is saying, but this is equivalent to art students discussing the technicality and construction of canvases. Even if you select the best canvas in the world, it does not make your painting better. I think that too much of writing about programming is focused on the details of the programming act, and too little on the result of the programming. Reading about finding and learning a programming language is like reading about an artist choosing a brush. Reading about the technical details of someone scaling a Django app on a single server to serve 1000 concurrent requests per second is like seeing the finished artwork.

anc2020 17y ago
> Reading about finding and learning a programming language is like reading about an artist choosing a brush. Wands are a much better metaphor to make. Or perhaps, what if you had a magic brush that could at any time be extremely fine or large or anywhere in between depending on how you felt? That would be some brush, especially when you compare it to the many medium sized brushes which aren't so fine when you need them to be. Okay, so maybe the metaphor is still stretching a bit, but these are no ordinary brushes; they are worth writing about.

wingo 17y ago

It's funny, just today I finished up some work merging a hygienic expander into the core of Guile. I've been writing defmacros for a few years now, and while things are not all lovely in the world of syntax-rules or syntax-case, it is so much more lovely to write a macro that you know catches the important cases, and that will compose well with other code, and /especially/ code from other modules. That said, have fun with Arc ;-)

stcredzero 17y ago

From what this guy is saying, the power of Lisp style Macros is akin to what I can do with the syntactic Rewrite Tool and Blocks (Lambdas) in Smalltalk. I've always been led to believe that Lisp Macros are something even more powerful. (I haven't had the time to really delve into them.)

jimbokun 17y ago
Yes, there was a recent article on HN about "your language features are my libraries." http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/05/20/your-language-features-are-my-libraries/ http://blog.bitquabit.com/2009/05/20/your-language-features-... That was comparing Smalltalk to C#, but it is a similar idea. Smalltalk and Lisp belong to that elite fraternity of programming languages where the ability to easily extend the syntax is built into the language. The mechanisms are different, but the expressive power is similar.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Well, I've heard that Blocks get you most of the way to Macros, but not quite. I'm wondering if the "not quite" part is something beyond what's afforded by the Rewrite Tool. The Rewrite Tool is not dynamic. Perhaps this is the key? But I could imagine a Smalltalk function that takes a method, applies a Rewrite Tool syntactic transformation to its source, compiles the method as a Block, then calls this Block with the arguments that would've been send to the original method. Something like: perform: methodName with: arguments rewriting: aMatchingPattern as: aRewritePattern Where aMatchingPattern would be something like: ``@rcv ifTrue: `Block1 ifFalse: `Block2 Then aRewritePattern could be something like: "Order of Blocks reversed" ``@rcv ifTrue: `Block2 ifFalse: `Block1 Just be careful to cache the result of the compilation by method name and Class, and this wouldn't be too much slower than a conventional #perform: This particular example would let you dynamically call any method, but with all of the if-then-else equivalents with the then and else clauses swapped. Would this constitute Smalltalk Macros?
  - jimbokun 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

pg 17y ago

We're releasing a new version quite soon. So once again, if there's anything you want fixed, now is the time to tell us. http://arclanguage.org/item?id=9257 http://arclanguage.org/item?id=9257 One of the things I want to add next is graphics libraries. Does anyone have any recommendations for what to plug into to munge images?

crescendo 17y ago
Does anyone have any recommendations for what to plug into to munge images? ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/ http://www.imagemagick.org/) has worked well for us. There are bindings out there for many languages, including Common Lisp (http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-magick/ http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-magick/); you might want to look there for inspiration.
- pg 17y ago
  We used ImageMagick to manipulate images in Viaweb. So if it's still the best thing around now, 14 years later, it must be pretty good. Thanks!
gills 17y ago
ImageMagick? Cairo? OpenGL bindings?
- mbrubeck 17y ago
  Cairo bindings would be awesome for graphing, vector art, and fancy text (and a nice complement to a bitmap manipulation library like ImageMagick).
Take2 17y ago
just out of curiosity where do graphics libraries sit relative to these ? http://arclanguage.org/item?id=4070 http://arclanguage.org/item?id=4070 Are you planning to do another poll ?
tsally 17y ago
++ for OpenGL bindings. OpenGL is one of the more expressive and creative tools someone can use while programming for fun.

CatDancer 17y ago

OK, I have a HN etiquette question. I don't post much on HN, and I wasn't the one who posted the link to my thank-you here on HN. I've had a HN account for a while, but I'm still pretty much a newbie to HN. I have a desire to not just stand here and take it on the chin as mahmud publicly proclaims that I'm pandering, a Lisp newbie, irrational, a blind fanboy, hypocritical, dismissive, and unfair. On the other hand I don't want to waste everyone's time with a tedious flamewar. Thoughts?

gruseom 17y ago
Reply once and ignore the rest.
pg 17y ago
He was surprisingly nasty about it, but I wouldn't bother fighting back. A lot of the people who voted up his comment didn't do it because they agreed with him so much as because they're worried you'll start a trend of people posting stuff trying to suck up to us. Which is actually a reasonable thing to worry about, considering that a significant number of HN users think they might one day apply to YC. So you were basically just unlucky.
bitdiddle 17y ago
It happens to us all I guess, sometimes it's too much coffee too early in the day or someone hits a soft spot. It's easy to misinterpret what people say on the net. FWIW I too had a very positive superficial read of Arc when it was first published and I'm neither a fanboy nor a Lisp newbie. Scheme is one of my true loves.

10ren 17y ago

First I figure out how to do what I need to do, then I translate that into the constructs of the language, then I try it and it doesn’t work, and then I debug or figure it out :-). It's a wonderful thing to have a language that matches how you think, an extension of your mind analogous to how physical tools can be an extension of your body, with a heft, weight and balance that causes them to leap to hand, and guide you at times. But my particular tasks at the moment involve so much more work at the drawing board (the figuring stage) that having better tools doesn't actually help me - much as I would love them to. It's very true that the tools you need depend on your personal way of thinking, the task, the stage of the task, and how many times you've done it.

jpedrosa 17y ago

Hi. My experience lies in Ruby and in JavaScript (these days) so I can see these worlds however close, differently. In Ruby I have all kinds of gimmicks that help with cutting the chase when that's what I want, but I also can make it a little harder when I am interested in something else, in experimenting with some other approach. What I find a little disgusting is when my "meta-programming" in Ruby starts doing things like when an exception occurs, it points to a line number slightly different than where it really is, or when the backtrace becomes all the more "hacked" with harder to understand things thrown in there. It serves to remind us that there are tradeoffs involved. Also there is the issue creating shareable modules and when you start hacking it away it can make it all the more harder to share. But it's more than fun, it does work, it's just that one can have mixed feelings because for ever cool finding or development, there can exist a little nuisance as well or something that you cannot quite do anymore because you deviated from mainstream... I gotta go have lunch! Be well.