Paul Graham's Arc is released today... what is the long term impact? - lisp

On Feb 12, 11:44 am, Ken Tilton <kennytil...@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> ps. Doing ArcCellsLite today. k
>

Neat! Be sure to post your progress on your blog. BTW, Arc1 is out
today:
http://arclanguage.org/item?id=2166

Joost Diepenmaat <joost@zeekat.nl> writes:

> Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> writes:
>
>> Yep. I know a lot of words that are very hard to type on a QWERTY
>> keyboard. Just put the following in your ~/.emacs:
>>
>> (global-set-key (kbd "A-q") (lambda () (interactive) (insert "(CONS "))))
> [...]
>
> Getting off-topic, but which key is the "A" modifier? I already use C, M
> and S, and for some reason the "windows menu key" seems to be bound to
> "M-x" by default.

A- Alt
C- Control
M- Meta
H- Hyper
S- Shift
s- super

Once upon a time (on the Space Cadet Keyboard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard), there was also:

T- Top
F- Front

Note that on that keyboard, λ was F-l


--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/

READ THIS BEFORE OPENING PACKAGE: According to certain suggested
versions of the Grand Unified Theory, the primary particles
constituting this product may decay to nothingness within the next
four hundred million years.

Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> writes:

> Once upon a time (on the Space Cadet Keyboard
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard), there was also:
>
> T- Top
> F- Front
>
> Note that on that keyboard, λ was F-l

Ah yes, I thought there was a "greek" key on that. Seems I was right.

Time to mess with my keymaps...

Thanks,
Joost.

--
Joost Diepenmaat | blog: http://joost.zeekat.nl/ | work: http://zeekat.nl/

Sohail Somani wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:05:43 -0500, Ken Tilton wrote:
>
>
>>No, look at the migrations from C to Java to Python to Ruby. The herd
>>has no loyalty.
>
>
> I notice you do not mention C++. Did the herd not move into/past C++?
>

I did not want to burden the reader, plus it seemed to me a lot of
people never even headed down the C++ dead-end. Industry did, but I was
talking about the folks in the trenches.

And to tell you the truth, it is not clear to me how many mainframe
types ever made it to C, I might better have started the list at Java.

In the end I remembered that I have never let a concern for accuracy get
in the way of my rants, way too much work.

hth, kenny

--
http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/
http://www.theoryyalgebra.com/

"In the morning, hear the Way;
in the evening, die content!"
-- Confucius

Vetle Roeim wrote:
> Ken Tilton <kennytilton@optonline.net> writes:
>
>
>>John Stoneham wrote:
>>
>>>On Feb 11, 5:19 pm, Ken Tilton <kennytil...@optonline.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Think bigger. The people trying Arc are Pythonistas and Rubicons, all of
>>>>whom are focused on applications. They will not even notice the
>>>>difference between Scheme and CL, but they will see CL has a bigger
>>>>toolbox and then they'll choose CL.
>>>
>>>
>>>It's my experience that Pythonistas and Rubicons are so in love with
>>>themselves for having chosen their respective languages that they see
>>>little benefit in exploring elsewhere and often scorn those who do.
>>
>>No, look at the migrations from C to Java to Python to Ruby. The herd
>>has no loyalty.
>
>
> I haven't heard anyone going this route. People seem to be going from
> Java to Ruby, not from Python to Ruby, which is a step backwards. Ruby
> has too many similarities with Perl.
>

See: http://wiki.alu.org/RtL_Highlight_Film

The path followed does not make it into the highlights (you have to
click thru to the whole Road) but it's a fun place to start.

Python has some nice stupid pet tricks, but it is fundamentally broken
in ways (I gather from the hoopla) Ruby is not (is it that blocks are
better than Python's pathtic lambda (we should make them stop using that
name)).

kenny
--
http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/
http://www.theoryyalgebra.com/

"In the morning, hear the Way;
in the evening, die content!"
-- Confucius

Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> writes:

> Kent M Pitman <pitman@nhplace.com> writes:
>
> > The Lisp Machine used the SAIL (Stanford AI Lab) character set, which
> > had Lambda allocated on code 008, and which aligned with BS
> > (backspace) in ASCII. In MACLISP code (sometimes with help from #+/#-
> > compatibility), you could write such a compatibility macro. But this
> > meant that on "glass" displays (CRT displays that were not bitmapped
> > and could not overstrike), it had a delete effect; on paper terminals
> > and some display terminals, it backed up and overstruck; and in EMACS
> > it displayed as ^H ...
> >
> > Some people used it anyway, and it just looked very weird.
>
> Nowadays, one can easily bind in emacs a key to any character.
> There are a lot of useless keys on a PC-105 keyboard...

Btw, I wasn't talking about the difficulty of typing them. I was
presupposing that you had typed in the character successfully. I was
talking about how the character rendered visually, and why there was
not an early move to use the lambda character in code. Even in
systems like the Lisp Machine, it wasn't done--I think mostly because
LispM users often stored their program texts (their .lisp files) on a
mainframe such as a PDP-10 or VAX, and then often edited their
programs there in EMACS, since Lisp Machines (being expensive) were
often shared by several users at different times of day. When in
EMACS, the fact that programs looked much different than in LispM
Zmacs was enough to keep a lot of the special characters from being
used. It just wasn't worth having the pretty display in some places
and the non-pretty display elsewhere.

John Stoneham wrote:
> On Feb 12, 11:44 am, Ken Tilton <kennytil...@optonline.net> wrote:
>
>>ps. Doing ArcCellsLite today. k
>>
>
>
> Neat! Be sure to post your progress on your blog.

Yeah, good call, my next blog entry will be its development, I'll just
keep editing it as I go. Don't know if that's bloglegal...

> BTW, Arc1 is out

Thx, it will be interesting to see what changed. I am pretty sure
nothing that would affect me.

kenny

--
http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/
http://www.theoryyalgebra.com/

"In the morning, hear the Way;
in the evening, die content!"
-- Confucius

Ron Garret <rNOSPAMon@flownet.com> writes:

> It's not mnemonic. It makes a certain amount of sense that FN should
> mean "function". That LAMBDA should mean function does not.

But it doesn't just mean "function", it means "function abstraction",
or more procedurally "make a function that takes this arglist out of
that expression". "fn" seems like the name of some specific function,
not an operator that makes an unnamed function.
--
(espen)

Ken Tilton <kentilton@gmail.com> wrote:
+---------------
| John Stoneham wrote:
| > BTW, Arc1 is out
|
| Thx, it will be interesting to see what changed. I am pretty sure
| nothing that would affect me.
+---------------

From <http://arclanguage.org/item?id=2166> and followup comments:

- New tarball: <http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc1.tar>

- New syntax: x.y and x!y as abbreviations for (x y) and (x 'y), resp.

- SUBSEQ changed into CUT, and now takes negative indices.

- Misc. bug fixes, other stuff.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock <rpw3@rpw3.org>
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