Ask Hackers: Are you planning to do your startup in Arc?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99053

by kirubakaran • 19 years ago

13 59 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What are your Arc related plans?

Please share your thoughts.

nreece• 19 years ago

Doing a startup in something that's not even public yet?

ardit33• 19 years ago

lol... is it yc application season yet?

utnick2• 19 years ago

to 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 ;)

Kaizyn2• 19 years ago

Well said, spoken like a true Blub programmer!

reitzensteinm2• 19 years ago

Right, and ad hominem attacks are OK if someone really doesn't get it?

kirubakaran• 19 years ago

If you frequent programming.reddit, you must have read http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html ? Is your opinion still the same?

utnick2• 19 years ago

I 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.

mechanical_fish• 19 years ago

Aw, 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!

eru4• 19 years ago

We just went from 19 to 20. (Or worse.)

Hexstream2• 19 years ago

"Languages don't matter!"

That's why I write raw machine code exclusively!

eru4• 19 years ago

I use dice to decide in which language I write today.

andreyf• 19 years 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• 19 years ago

That 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• 19 years ago

Languages 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• 19 years ago

There 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• 19 years ago

That'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.

Hexstream2• 19 years ago

Seems like you're a good candidate for a catch-22...

comatose_kid• 19 years ago

Not 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• 19 years ago

If 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?

eru4• 19 years ago

If you can re-use the MzScheme libraries there is some hope.

plinkplonk• 19 years ago

I 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• 19 years ago

I'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• 19 years ago

I'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• 19 years ago

Ah, 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• 19 years ago

Not 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).

ntoshev• 19 years ago

No, 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• 19 years ago

Writing code is only half of "doing a startup".

mrtron• 19 years ago

Depends on the startup.

Writing code is between 1% and 99% of a startup.

bayareaguy2• 19 years ago

Is 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• 19 years ago

I'm doing mine in Arc#.NET.

kajecounterhack• 19 years ago

@kirubakaran - "What are your Arc related plans?"

I plan to build the arc, set sail and bring 2 of every animal with me.

;)

Ask Hackers: Are you planning to do your startup in Arc?

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