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1 point by kinnard 3324 days ago | link | parent | on: Make your first programming language — in one hour

This took me about 3 hrs by the way

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2 points by kinnard 3324 days ago | link | parent | on: Lisp Beginner

What attracted you to LISP? And to Arc? If you don't mind my asking.

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2 points by Styx 3324 days ago | link

Mostly pg's essays. I'm actually fairly new to programming in general, though I have a ton of interest.

I'm coming from a Ruby background and I was just admitted to a coding bootcamp, for reference.

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2 points by kinnard 3324 days ago | link

I see. Yeah his essays are very seductive. I got pulled in.

Have you read the Roots of Lisp: http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/jmc.ps

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1 point by Styx 3324 days ago | link

Ah, well, I skimmed it yesterday. Which I guess skimming is the last thing to do when it comes to a document of that sort ^.^

Essentially, I want to learn Lisp because the colloquial "they" recommend it to gain a better understanding of programming in general.

I want to learn Arc because it seems to take the lisp philosophy to heart the most out of the lisps.

And generally, I'm the type of person that can withstand some amount of "jumping into the deep end." Although, I may be in a bit too deep this time. Heh.

I'll probably continue to lurk around here until I've got a bit more experience under my belt, and thoughts to contribute.

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2 points by kinnard 3324 days ago | link

It's definitely worth the read. It's the "Foundation" and nothing can beat knowing the axioms cold. That article was my red pill.

Arc isn't exactly living up to the vision: [1] https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/40#issuecomment... [2] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=19492

And the vision is questionable to begin with: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=19554

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3 points by kinnard 3324 days ago | link | parent | on: Lisp Beginner

This might not be really helpful because the arc "atom" isn't quite the same as the lisp "atom"[1][2]

arc> (src atom)

(from "arc.arc")

(def atom (x)

  (in type.x 'int 'num 'sym 'char 'string))

==================================================

(define (ar-type x)

  (cond ((ar-tagged? x)     (vector-ref x 1))

        ((pair? x)          'cons)

        ((symbol? x)        'sym)

        ((null? x)          'sym)

        ((procedure? x)     'fn)

        ((char? x)          'char)

        ((string? x)        'string)

        ((exint? x)         'int)

        ((number? x)        'num)     ; unsure about this

        ((vector? x)        'vector)

        ((hash-table? x)    'table)

        ((output-port? x)   'output)

        ((input-port? x)    'input)

        ((tcp-listener? x)  'socket)

        ((exn? x)           'exception)

        ((thread? x)        'thread)

        ((thread-cell? x)   'thread-cell)

        ((keyword? x)       'keyword)

        (#t                 (err "Type: unknown type" x))))

(xdef type ar-type)

[1] https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/40#issuecomment...

[2] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=19492

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2 points by kinnard 3324 days ago | link | parent | on: Lisp Beginner

Welcome!!! Best place to pester might be the github: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues.

Though I think a real stack exchange community is in order.

As to your question, I'm not qualified to answer, but it depends on your goals. What are your goals?

EDIT: Probably not though. Arc is intended to be "powerful"[1] not "educational" and Arc doesn't behave the way scheme does in(I believe) a lot of cases, e.g.: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/issues/48

[1] http://paulgraham.com/power.html

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2 points by akkartik 3324 days ago | link

I'm not sure how many people here follow the github account, so if you have questions just post them here. Don't worry about creating too many posts or comments, it's not like there's a lot of contention here :) Just do what works best for your learning, and we'll let you know if we want you to scale back.

If you see something broken or have suggestions to improve the documentation, post them on Github.

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2 points by Styx 3324 days ago | link

Yeah I figured that would be the deal getting into it, but I'm still willing to learn it. I think the whole philosophy is really neat.

I think what I'm going to try to do is continue to play around with Arc, while also learning on something a bit more established. Maybe Scheme or Clojure.

Thanks for the advice.

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3 points by kinnard 3324 days ago | link

Is there something you have in mind to build?

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3 points by Styx 3324 days ago | link

Well, I was thinking about building a chess engine in it at some point. But then, I intended to read a few books between now and then.

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3 points by kinnard 3324 days ago | link

That would be cool! "Chess engine" means no graphics, right?

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2 points by Styx 3324 days ago | link

Right. I created one in Ruby not too long ago. Then I decided I wanted to see it in the browser, so I used something called Opal to convert my Ruby code to JS. Then I built up the necessary html/css.

It's over at https://rawgit.com/Styx-/personal_website/master/index.html under projects if you want to see it.

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1 point by Styx 3324 days ago | link

Also, how much effort would it take to do something similar in Arc?

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1 point by kinnard 3324 days ago | link

You know . . . I have no idea . . :)

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3 points by kinnard 3326 days ago | link | parent | on: ASK: Arc-Language Forum Reliability

Hmmm, that's interesting but I don't think it's what I'm running into. I get it on a first visit. I don't think my housemates are visiting the arc-forum at all . . .

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2 points by kinnard 3328 days ago | link | parent | on: The Lisp Curse

What had you wondering about this?

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1 point by kinnard 3329 days ago | link | parent | on: ASK: Arc Language Slack?

Perhaps we could convince the HN team to add a link to the slack.

Or we could try to roll and irc/slack-like system in Arc and add that . . .

It gets lonely around here.

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3 points by rocketnia 3329 days ago | link

If the Arc Forum adds a link to anything, I hope it adds a link to the community-maintained Arc website (https://arclanguage.github.io/). We can add links to other resources from there.

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2 points by akkartik 3328 days ago | link

"It gets lonely around here."

There you go again trying to solve social problems with technical solutions :) You'll fit right in with Lisp.

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1 point by kinnard 3329 days ago | link | parent | on: ASK: Arc Language Slack?

That would be very cool.

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2 points by kinnard 3329 days ago | link | parent | on: The Lisp Curse

H/T kartik. Interesting because of its discussion of the sociality of Lisp.

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1 point by kinnard 3330 days ago | link | parent | on: How Knowing Lisp Destroyed My Programming Career

Interesting because it contrasts with a lot of what we hear about Lisp . . .

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2 points by akkartik 3330 days ago | link

Yeah, there were several such stories during what I think of as Lisp's angsty mid-life crisis during and after the AI winter :) A couple more good ones:

http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm

http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

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1 point by kinnard 3329 days ago | link

"Programs written by individual hackers tend to follow the scratch-an-itch model. These programs will solve the problem that the hacker, himself, is having without necessarily handling related parts of the problem which would make the program more useful to others. Furthermore, the program is sure to work on that lone hacker's own setup, but may not be portable to other Scheme implementations or to the same Scheme implementation on other platforms. Documentation may be lacking. Being essentially a project done in the hacker's copious free time, the program is liable to suffer should real-life responsibilities intrude on the hacker. As Olin Shivers noted, this means that these one-man-band projects tend to solve eighty-percent of the problem."

Sounds like a package manager problem.

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