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Ask Hackers: Are you planning to do your startup in Arc?
What are your Arc related plans?
Please share your thoughts.
- nreece 19y agoDoing a startup in something that's not even public yet?
- ardit33 19y agolol... is it yc application season yet?
- utnick 19y agoto be honest i'm tired of all this language talk. The fanboism surrounding lisp, haskell, arc, scheme, erlang, and other less popular languages is getting to be a little too much Languages don't matter! When I first started programming, I was so impressed by superhackers who knew like 10 languages or were experts in obscure ones like Forth and whatnot. Then as I learned more languages, I realized that languages are just interfaces into the computer system. Thats it. Arc won't be able to do anything that binary code can't do. This is nothing against pg. If you want to create a language because that interests you. Great! I'm just tired of all the elitist fanboys mentally masturbating over how great their language is. maybe i just read programming.reddit too much tho ;)
- Kaizyn 19y agoWell said, spoken like a true Blub programmer!
- reitzensteinm 19y agoRight, and ad hominem attacks are OK if someone really doesn't get it?
- Kaizyn 19y agoAs a programmer who has a preferred Blub language myself, I saw it more as a flip comment than any sort of name calling. Until someone actually sits down and invents the "100 year language", it won't matter much if you're using a powerful language or one of the lesser blubs.
- kirubakaran 19y agoIf you frequent programming.reddit, you must have read http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ? Is your opinion still the same?
- utnick 19y agoI must admit I am curious about his statement that 25% of viaweb code would have been very difficult to do in other languages. I would like to hear examples of that. My feeling is that the success of viaweb development had much less to do with lisp than it had to with PG and friends being really good hackers.
- pg 19y agoWhat a weird situation. I keep trying to tell people Lisp is great, and they say, no, no, you guys were just really good programmers. But if I'm such a good programmer, why don't they believe me?
- whacked_new 19y agoTo nitpick this remark, Suppose: 1, cperciva is a really good programmer, 2, writing a Viaweb is within his ability. Given: cperciva intends to write a Viaweb. Result: Viaweb in C. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96431 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96431 (I know, the logic is flawed. I'm being half-facetious)
- pg 19y agoViaweb manipulated s-expressions at runtime and called compile on them. One literally could not write it in C, short of writing a Lisp interpreter in C, which is what Yahoo had to do when they ported it to C++ after I left.
- mooneater 19y agoI believe it could be very ugly in C, but not that it could not be written in C.
- mechanical_fish 19y agoAw, man, you fed the troll with an even larger troll. This is going to be messy. Maybe I can defuse the situation with the Premature Godwin Maneuver. Look! Over there! It's Hitler!
- eru 19y agoWe just went from 19 to 20. (Or worse.)
- Hexstream 19y ago"Languages don't matter!" That's why I write raw machine code exclusively!
- eru 19y agoI use dice to decide in which language I write today.
- noonespecial 19y agoWuss. I use dice AS the input device. Yep. Has a random number generator built right in, it does.
- Xichekolas 19y agoSo what language do you use when you roll a 20?
- eru 19y agoDO COME FROM (20) USE Intercal PLEASE GIVE UP P.S. Could somebody write a real piece of Intercal-code for language selection?
- andreyf 19y ago> I realized that languages are just interfaces into the computer system. Thats it. What do you mean... that's it? From where I stand, that's quite a lot...
- eVizitei 19y agoThat is a really brash statement. Usually this kind of comment comes from someone who hasn't really explored the advantages of the different languages they've tried, they've just taken every language that's come to them and manhandled it until it felt like the language they like. I've seen that happen before a lot, somebody likes C very much, so when they're introduced to Lisp, they basically write C in lisp. what does that give you? well for one thing, you have basically a program that is no better than the C version, but with a strange syntax. However, it means that the coder also hasn't taken advantage of the things you can do in lisp that are different from the things you can do in C. You can't write closures in C, so if you've only ever written in C you probably won't use them when writing in Lisp, and thus it seems like a pretty useless transition. Languages ARE interfaces to the computer system, but that doesn't mean that some aren't more powerful than others. I could write a paper with a typewriter or a word processor, which are both viable ways to produce a document, but I can do things with a word processor that just aren't feasible on a typewriter. If you've never used a word processor, you won't miss things like "copy and paste" or being able to tweak your margins at any time, but if you HAVE used one before you will feel stifled without those abilities. Now, if you use a word processor, but you don't figure out how to use any of those handy features, than it's just an electronic typewriter to you and you'll say things like "tools don't matter! Typewriters and Word Processors are just two different ways to write a paper. That's it!" of course, you'll probably get a few odd looks for saying that.
- mmp 19y agoLanguages don't matter, eh? A month ago I heard a couple of hackers talk about how they were able to complete a personnel scheduler in Scheme in 20'000 LOC and a few weeks time, when the previous C++ codebase was 200'000 LOC and was never going to be finished. Not always, but for certain endeavours, certain languages are just much better tools for the job than others, and by better, understand order of magnitude better. That's a very real fact, even if it doesn't make the languages zealots any less obnoxious.
- edw519 19y agoThere are times when I just want to say, "Anything you can build, I can build in BASIC," but I chicken out. OK, here goes... Anything you can build, I can build in BASIC. Sure, I may have drop down a level and roll out some tools every once in a while, but my BASIC app will so whatever your <language du jour> app does. There. I feel better already.
- streblo 19y agoThat's not really something I could answer at this point. I would never put my faith in a language that I haven't hacked around in.
- Hexstream 19y agoSeems like you're a good candidate for a catch-22...
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- comatose_kid 19y agoNot really - hacking around with Arc doesn't require faith in it (since the commitment level is well below the level where you would use it to implement your Next Great Idea). And of course hacking around in it is how he would become confident/impressed enough to use it for bigger things.
- nickb 19y agoIf you want to write a ton of your own support libraries, feel free to join the fray. While you're writing a library to upload files to S3 (or whatever), others are going to be implementing actual website features in Rails. Do you see where I'm going with this?
- eru 19y agoIf you can re-use the MzScheme libraries there is some hope.
- plinkplonk 19y agoI think you make a good point but also consider, MZ Scheme links trivially to C libraries. I would think that anyone who uses Arc would use this facility heavily. Now whether there exists a C library to do exactly what you want is a different question. And I know this might be heretical here, but ROR is hardly the great time saver the fanboys make it out to be when you count in issues like deployment and doing non standard things with it. (Don't get me wrong, it is a good framework, but it is hardly a magic wand and neither is it very unique - Wicket + scala comes very close to ROR in productivity for example) PS: How long do you think it would take before people hack up a virtual machine or C code emitter? I, for one would do exactly this if I planned to use it in my startup. It isn't that hard (Ruby's recursive descent sloooww interpreter still powers all those RoR sites, minus the vanishingly few ones in JRuby.)
- ecuzzillo 19y agoI've dealt with a couple systems that link Lisp 'trivially' to C. When they say they link trivially, what they mean is that they let you call the function in the C library just like you'd call it from C. This is frequently extremely not how you want to do it in Lisp, and so you're forced to either a) write a Lispification layer, in which you take all the C functions and turn them into a library that acts like you want a Lisp library to act (the usual approach), or b) just write it like it's in C, which makes you very angry all day long, and also loses some of the benefit of writing in Lisp. Both approaches slow you down quite a lot. Especially if you decide not to be an asshole and release your lispification layer as open-source (which you should)-- because then people will all be pounding down your door for fixes and extensions and maintenance for new versions of the C library, which is not what you want to do. You didn't even want to write the layer to begin with, presumably. So no, 'trivial' C linking not actually a silver bullet making everything hunky-dorey with respect to lack of libraries. Python has a significant advantage in that it's popular enough for many people to have already gone through the Pythonification process for most important libraries, and have also open-sourced their Pythonification layers.
- tjr 19y agoI've been anxiously awaiting to give Arc a try for five or six years now. I don't necessarily have a particular project in mind for it yet, but from what I've seen, I expect to like it, and will start using it for SOMETHING as soon as possible.
- tyler 19y agoAh, I've got this one figured out. I'm going to use it to implement another dialect of CL... in which I will implement a dialect of Scheme... in which I will reimplement Arc. I'd like to see how many iterations of this one could go through before it becomes completely unusable even for simple arithmetic. Assuming each one interprets the next.
- yelsgib 19y agoNot only do I plan to do my startup in Arc, I've already decided to use holographic storage to do my backups (it's big, you know).
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- ntoshev 19y agoNo, but I may try Clojure. Because it runs on the JVM, there are lots of libraries, and I can always fall back to Java/JRuby if something doesn't work. Arc and Clojure together may make for a great Lisp year.
- icky 19y agoWriting code is only half of "doing a startup".
- mrtron 19y agoDepends on the startup. Writing code is between 1% and 99% of a startup.
- bayareaguy 19y agoIs any startup ever "done" in just one language? Everwhere I've been there are a half a dozen. Why not just wait to see what Arc ends up doing really well out of the box and then considering it for that and leave the things it doesn't handle to something else?
- jmzachary 19y agoI'm doing mine in Arc#.NET.
- kajecounterhack 19y ago@kirubakaran - "What are your Arc related plans?" I plan to build the arc, set sail and bring 2 of every animal with me. ;)
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]