

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

What are your Arc related plans?<p>Please share your thoughts.
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utnick
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 ;)

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mechanical_fish
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!

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

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nickb
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?

~~~
plinkplonk
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.)

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ecuzzillo
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.

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yelsgib
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).

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

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ardit33
lol... is it yc application season yet?

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streblo
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.

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

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comatose_kid
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.

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

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

;)

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bayareaguy
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?

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tjr
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.

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tyler
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.

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ntoshev
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.

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

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mrtron
Depends on the startup.

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

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jmzachary
I'm doing mine in Arc#.NET.

