rdmckenzie

Almost certainly not, see the most recent post on this subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9013669

Author here.

Oh. HN frontpage. That's cool I guess.

Well I have plans for today, so I'm sorry that I won't be sitting here defending my article.

However if you hit me up on twitter at the link at the bottom or email me at my listed email address I'd be more than happy to respond and debate this piece in due time.

Cheers! Reid

Author here. Holy cow. Thanks for all the kind words guys! I'm primarily a back end dev interested in hardware, compilers and operating systems. As a long time HN reader I can't begin to express how amazing it is that a my first "real" web service which I started less than a week ago made the front page.

I hope that for those Clojure users among you Grimoire proves a useful resource and I welcome any feedback or other commentary you may have on the site and its usability. Stay tuned, there's plenty more in the works from me and I'm reading the feedback with interest.

Author here. After maintaining a blog built around a "real" CMS, and a "real" CMS that I built myself, I'll say that my existing blog is built atop Jekyll and Git, the same stack I chose for Grimoire. It's simply the most basic thing that could possibly work, and it doesn't demand that I run a JVM on my inexpensive DigitalOcean instance. For all that I enjoy using Clojure, a "real" Ring server with a "real" database backend simply doesn't add anything to this project beyond complicating it further. As such I don't expect that a database rewrite of Grimoire is on the cards for some time to come.

To "how you build such a site in Clojure" the answer is that the entire Clojure ecosystem shies away from monolithic web frameworks and prepackaged solutions ala rails. Instead, Clojure libraries tend to pick a single feature or some small set of fetures, cover them well, expose a simple API and make composition trivial rather than trying to solve all possible problems.

Dash integration... Dash only makese sense for languages for which the documentation isn't trivially introspected such as Java. Clojure has the clojure.repl library (http://grimoire.arrdem.com/1.6.0/clojure.repl/) which is designed to solve this problem by exposing Clojure documentation to users in their interactive development (REPL) sessions. As I explain at some length in the Grimoire announcement post (http://arrdem.com/2014/07/12/of_mages_and_grimoires/) Grimoire seeks to fill a fumdimentally different niche than Dash. Clojure already has docs, and those docs are already handy for users aware of clojure.repl. Grimoire seeks to solve the problem of documenting the various ins and outs of the standard library which do _not_ appear in the official Clojure docs and which are currently spread out across any number of other low PageRank score community sites.

Author here. I'm definitely aware that there are many pitfalls to Clojure than just the standard library docs. There's an open issue for adding a syntax guide and a macro guide, I'd be delighted to add a destructuring guide.

Author here: It's funny that you say this because as of right now there is only one example on Grimoire that isn't on Clojuredocs :P

I'm sure that adding a small disk with the source code to the warhead would be an acceptable and valued solution.

responding to bitemyapp? brave...

Application of research methods before breakfast? good man.

When the risk of of obtaining content by illegal means is not outweighed by the cost of doing so by legal means. If I can pay USD 1 or Ɖ1500 or some other small amount to watch a movie not listed on Netflix instantly I would gladly do so. The risk of getting a "friendly reminder" from the RIAA or some other entity that $UNIVERSITY is required to disclose who I am and that I've been a bad boy completely outweighs such a low cost. However if it costs me $5 or $10 or I run Linux (which I do) and can't even use any of the legal services then it becomes worth my time, effort and risk to find three proxy services which I halfway trust and run a Torrent client over some combination of them.

Correct, however if this "exact runtime bound" is what you are going for, then please use the correct notation. T(N) = 2N would be legitimate, as would \Theta(N) = 2N. Saying that O(F(N)) = 2N is misleading because the definition of the big-o notation explicitly discards all constant factors and constant annends.

Totally agreed, unfortuantely however this introduces significant constraints in the parent/child/sibling insertion and navigation model.

No. That would defeat the entire user model, which is purpsoefully derived from Bitcoin's anonymity structure.

"designed two processors". No. We had working A0 production runs of two chips, with a the A0 of the third generation in the post when we closed. Leaner? Not really. Sales team was three people more the executives, everyone else was engineering. Meaner? Who on earth pulls off two working A0 runs?

Writing this as a now ex-employee, I'm sure that our IP will live on. We had some really neat stuff in the pipeline, and I look forwards to seeing it hit the big time in the next few years. Whether Calxeda proper will be acquired or whether the IP will be sold piecemeal only time will tell. Personally I'm not convinced that the company in it's "entirety" will be bough out. At this point it's the IP not the assets or people that's valuable.

I also totally agree with your assessment that we had a cool idea too early. That was in fact what Barry said at today's closing down meeting. ARM in the datacenter will happen, but that we didn't have a 64 bit chip really limited our hardware offerings to say the least.

You've also described Clojure...

Arguably, but the D-21 drone [1] was... a mess & a failure. Line Of Sight radio control was the only real option.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_D-21

Not only are we to cheep to fly fast but we've also banned supersonic flight over most "civilized" land masses. There are only three or so US mainland airbases where it is legal to break mach 1 due to the fact that the voting public doesn't want to listen to sonic booms. Thanks to relatively new "shaped sonic boom" technology it is possible to massively reduce the acustic profile of supersonic flight but the damage is done. We're too cheap to fly fast and the technology which we need to fly fast still doesn't come cheap.

Context: At this point in history, the USA and USSR had aircraft fleets on constant patrol with tanker resupply. The concept was to simultaneously shorten the response time of strategic nuclear forces by having them "idle" nearer the target zones than their home bases and more importantly to reduce the potential losses of such strategic strike forces to a "bolt from the blue" preemptive & disarming attack. In a world where the President and SAC command would have to wait hours for B-36 & predicessor aircraft to make their way to their targets in Russia.

There were three real issues with this project: shielding weight, landing weight and politics. 1. Shot down or crashing, one of these aircraft would be a "dirty bomb" and could generate a nuclear contamination disaster. This alone made the project risky. Remeber, during the heyday of strategic nuclear bombing shootdowns were expected & ariplane to target assignments were made on the basis of the expected (and dismal) survival rate of inbound bombers. Also a single crash on US soil would have been... politically unpopular. 2. The lead, graphite and cement used to shield static nuclear facilities doesn't exactly work when trying to build an airplane, which made crew shielding dubious and reduced the loiter time of such a vehicle to the radiation tolerance of the crew. 3. A mich more minor issue was that of building landing gear that could hold the weight of the reactor on landing let alone a crash.

All that asside, a flying nuke plant is a great idea and I for one would not be surprised to see this idea resurrected for extreme loiter duration robotic aircraft :/

Ars gives the SKIF-DM's designers more credit than they deserve. Gorbechev didn't want a Soviet SDI program and was highly critical of the military's existing research efforts in that direction [1] details at great (and I think facinating length) his efforts to dismantle the Soviet military machine. The -DM launch detailed here was the designers last ditch effort to save the program due to continued failure to produce either a sufficiently powerful chemical laser or a computer system capable of controlling it as the Sary Shagan [2] and Terra 3 [3] installations are ample proof.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous /dp/0307387844/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sary_Shagan

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra-3

Disclaimer: at age 20 I was born as these events drew to a close so my knowlege of this subject is restricted to the historical material I've read in incredulity that we stood on the brink for 50 years and came out alive.

bah just as I was finishing my register allocator...

My Firefox history indicates that I have read the Mjolnir page before, but I don't recall why I didn't use it at the time. Taking another look :-P. Thanks for the link!

I can't stress the C++ api part of this enough. At the moment I'm building a Pascal compiler in Clojure for course work and when the time came to do byte code generation the first thing I looked to was the LLVM infrastructure both for ease of use and because it would trivially provide me with the ability to target non-x86 platforms.

The reality of the matter is that interacting with non-java linked libraries is a real pain from every JVM language know of. Two years ago this was posted here [https://github.com/jasonjckn/llvm-clojure-bindings], but since then LLVM has gone through two major restructurings so it didn't work out of the box and I estimated that it would take less effort to build my own naive infrastructure than to patch this one & integrate it.

As a result I'm generating code in terms of lists of newline terminated assembly statement strings that I can just print or write to a file when I'm done. While I agree that C is a sub-optimal output format in that you have to compile the output, it is also the clear lingua franca for systems programming and assembly generation these days. Generating C gives you interesting options like linking to other C codebases or your own C code the same way that cljs gives you the option of interacting with "native" javascript libraries as well as clojurescript toolkits.

Speaking as a Lisper, I have to admit that this is an open question for me. On the one hand, the needs of parallel systems and state management offered by functional languages stands to bring Lisps (Clojure, Common Lisp etc) and other languages like Erlang ever more attention as we programmers attempt to manage the complexities of multicore design and distributed systems.

As a systems programming language I think that lisp has utterly failed. The Lisp machines are dead for various reasons (which I'm researching right now as a side-project) and to the best of my knowledge compiled lisp has clearly not taken the place of C in building operating systems (although I hope to do exactly that as does the author of [http://www.loper-os.org/]).

All of this comes down to an individual's definition of utility. Lisp is by definition of Turing Completeness just as capable as any other language you may wish to name, but with the usual Turing Tarpit or small language warning that you may have to roll your own. My perception, and one which several posts here on HN has affirmed is that traditionally Lisp was used by lone AI researchers who needed the power to roll their own anything quickly and efficiently. As a result of this "roll my own" mentality and simple lack of the internet (it was early and mid 1980s or so) libraries and SDKs as we know them were never built for Lisp systems.

Another difficulty is that as several other comments note there is no "one true" standard for Lisp. There is Scheme (which has official specs), there is ANSI Common Lisp which is a spec upon which several implementations have been based, and then there are countless other DIY and nonstandard lisps which elect to use different function names and otherwise make code non-trivially portable between lisp implementations. Not having a clear standard didn't help the lack of a library ecosystem at all, but some dialects such as Common Lisp and Clojure seem to be developing workable community library ecosystems. Of late Common Lisp has grown a library structure via ASDF code loading tool and the Quicklisp package manager, but Clojure is the only lisp I've ever encountered that really made any effort at all in the direction of providing native support for packaged libraries. The Clojure language includes syntax designed for allowing one file to explicitly state and "require" code in other files or even other libraries: a feature which is lacking from the Common Lisp standard. Thanks to technomancy's Leiningen tool and the clojars repository Clojure has a user-created system similar to Quicklisp + ASDF but trading ASDF's search path idiosyncrasies for a search path structure which should be familiar (or at least unsurprising) to Java developers.

TL;DR / Conclusion

If your boss comes to you and asks you to write a webpage, Lisp is probably not what you turn to. Could you? Sure, <shamelessplug> my blog is built in Clojure [http://arrdem.com].</shamelessplug> [http://refheap.com] is built in Clojure. [http://www.chris-granger.com/] is (presumably) Clojure. I know I've seen blogs in Common Lisp and other dialects but URLs escape me. Your boss says "Access the database", there are Clojure (okay fine Java but there is no real difference) libraries for SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra and more. Common Lisp also has SQL and MongoDB libraries. In short, while there is value in Lisp it is (for the time) not practically greater than the value of any other language despite the elegance of the functional approach and the power of the macro system. Hence its failure thus far to take over the world. However that same value proposition is improving as the CL and Clojure communities create and publish ever more libraries leading me to hope that Lisp may indeed take over the world one day.

I have to chime in and agree with this approach. When I built my blog, one of my "must-have" features was a comment system free of 3rd parties such as Reddit and FB. After some soul-searching and an honest look at my traffic logs I decided that as the primary purpose of my website is to serve as a resume and archive that anyone who wished to comment could simply email me and that lacking an embedded comment system

- Freed me from having to monitor any conversation and its contents

- Helped disguise how low-traffic the blog is (nothing says low traffic more than a single comment)

- As the Svbtle guys point out, most comments are relatively uninformed and tend to add little. There are exceptions such as HN and the StackOverflow family where intelligent(ish) discourse is the norm but the internet at large is wild and untamed.

- Were I to run my own comment structure I would feel obligated to provide security the guarantee that there are no XSS or other code injection vulnerabilities stemming from user-submitted text.

Consequently my blog has no commenting functionality.

Thanks for posting the link... that was a fascinating and illuminating link. Bookmarked in case someone else needs it later. +1