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jimbokun

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Object Oriented Arc (tinyurl.com)
12 points by jimbokun over 2 years ago | link
cached 6 days ago
"Where are we going?"
10 points by jimbokun about 1 year ago | link | parent | top
cached 11 days ago
"I don't want to make what people think they want right now."

Fair enough. I think this sentence pretty succinctly answers the questions in the original post of this discussion.

"Where are we going?"
8 points by jimbokun about 1 year ago | link | parent | top
cached 11 days ago
Your mantra in your role running Y-Combinator is "make something people want."

Is Arc exempt from that?

"Where are we going?"
8 points by jimbokun about 1 year ago | link | parent | top
cached 11 days ago
Perl, Python, and Ruby are successively closer approximations of Common Lisp.

I admire the ideas behind Clojure because it makes a different set of design decisions from Common Lisp. This seems to have even gotten the attention of Common Lisp developers, and those guys are pretty hard to impress.

The focus on immutability, literals for data structures other than lists that share a common "seq" interface, first class functions and closures, multi-methods without OO, lazy sequences, and full fledged macros hit an interesting sweet spot that is not touched by any other language I know. Mr. Hickey has managed to put all of those things together in a way that strengthen, reinforce, and complement one another. That is an impressive feat of language design.

My point is that Clojure is not "just" popular. By making unique decisions about the semantics of the language, and not just improving the syntax over the semantics of an existing language, Clojure may very well be one of those languages whose ideas remain influential long after it stops being popular.

(I'm curious, does Arc innovate in terms of its semantics being significantly different than its predecessors? It seems to have the goal of taking existing Lisp paradigms and making it possible to express them more succinctly. But I might be missing something important.)

So, even by the criteria you put forth, Clojure might be a language worth watching.

"Issues Regarding Lisp Adoption"
7 points by jimbokun over 2 years ago | link | parent | top
cached 13 days ago
"But sometimes I need to write a self-contained script that can take part in the whole Unix environment: things like being part of a pipeline, running as a cron job, running through CGI, running as a command. Python makes this trivial; Lisp makes this difficult or impossible."

This is hugely under-estimated as a reason for lack of Lisp adoption. I would put this way ahead of lack of IDEs.

"Clarification about Character Sets"
5 points by jimbokun over 2 years ago | link | parent | top
cached 22 days ago
(incf (gethash k table 0))

table is a hash table, k is a key, gethash returns the value in table for k or 0 if no value for k is found. Think of incf as ++. It will increment the value by 1 and set that as the value for k in table.

"Issues Regarding Lisp Adoption"
5 points by jimbokun over 2 years ago | link | top
cached 13 days ago
"I don't think there is a better candidate for an IDE target than Eclipse. It is very pretty."

Eclipse is ugly as sin.

Eclipse belongs to that school of UI design that further divides and subdivides the available space into smaller and smaller little tiles and panes until you are squinting at your code through a keyhole and distracted by all the stuff surrounding it. Yes, there are ways around this, but you have to fight the default paradigm. Most other IDEs adopt the same paradigm (to varying degrees).

Also, your whole point about IDEs does not account for the growing popularity of Python and Ruby. I know you point to an online Ruby interpreter, but these languages rose to popularity with most noobies first experiencing them through a text editor + shell/REPL environment. Stop and think about being a noobie downloading Eclipse and firing it up for the first time. What is the first step? How many steps will it take to see a useful result of your labor?

Versus an intro tutorial of:

    python
    >>> print "Hello world"
    Hello World
Congratulations! You're now a Python programmer! (Hope I didn't mess that up.)

Sorry for the rant, but I think many IDEs are largely a cargo cult phenomenon. pg has a quote somewhere about finally figuring out what an IDE is for; something like "it generates all the code that your Lisp macros generate for you!" IDEs are largely band aids to make bad languages not hurt quite as much.

"." not allowed in quasiquote?
5 points by jimbokun over 2 years ago | link
cached 8 days ago
"Where are we going?"
3 points by jimbokun about 1 year ago | link | parent | top
cached 11 days ago
Isn't Google (and others) already answering that question today?
"Object Oriented Arc"
2 points by jimbokun over 2 years ago | link | parent | top
cached 6 days ago
"Personally I prefer the approach in SICP ( http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-19.html.... )."

I was negligent in citing prior work. I had SICP in mind when I wrote my code.

The main differences are I wrapped it all up in a macro, I supported inheritance, and "method invocations" require one less set of parentheses:

    (define acc (make-account 100))
    ((acc 'withdraw) 50)
    50
    ((acc 'withdraw) 60)
    "Insufficient funds"
    ((acc 'deposit) 40)
    90
    ((acc 'withdraw) 60)
    30
I also didn't allow for initial arguments (yet). And you need to say "(vars 'varname)" to get values in method bodies instead of just "varname." I could probably fix both those things together.

But, generally speaking, the goal was to provide a macro for creating SICP style "objects."

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