

Ask PG: HN Outage - kgermino

About 20 minutes ago HN was down for me and downforeveryoneorjustme.com.  I know it didn't last log but I'm just curious about what happened.
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pg
I restarted it after changing some code. It takes about a minute to restart.
I'm surprised you haven't seen this before, since HN gets restarted every
couple days.

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cperciva
Why did you restart the server? I thought one of the points of arc was that it
allowed you to change the code without restarting.

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pg
I do that for small changes and to test stuff, but when you're copying and
pasting code into the repl it would be easy for the code in memory to diverge
from the code on disk.

Plus there are certain things that happen at startup, and if you typed code
into the repl that broke one of these, you wouldn't know.

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_delirium
> when you're copying and pasting code into the repl it would be easy for the
> code in memory to diverge from the code on disk

Ah, I take it you're not a fan of the old Lisp/Smalltalk approach of image-
oriented development, where tweaking the running system _is_ the canonical
version of the code?

(Apologies if one of your essays already covers your views on that; I don't
remember it being mentioned, and a quick search didn't turn up anything.)

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pg
No, I've never liked that Smalltalkish idea of storing programs one function
at a time. You lose information that way. I prefer to view programs as text. A
text file is actually a very cool and underrated abstraction.

It's not hard to imagine someone reinventing it as an advanced version of the
Smalltalk approach: add the ability to view multiple definitions in some
predefined order, add control over indentation (no small thing), add the
ability to intersperse comments between the definitions, and bingo, you've
reinvented the text file.

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s-phi-nl
Cincom Smalltalk's Web Velocity seems to have something like what you
describe. See <http://vimeo.com/groups/webvelocity/videos/6156626> at about
1:17

