At some point we were joking at ICFP that we might as well rename it into Oleg fan club. (I think that year he had contributed either directly or indirectly to a particularly large number of papers.)
The content is amazing indeed but with a “that’s out private club” feel to it. It’s not very inviting to new comers, most of its links on the footer or get started are dead.
All in all, charming in its way. I’ve been bumping into it every now and then for the past decades, being fascinated by the discussions, while never having consider to sign-up
That's definitely the focus but they're not fundamentalists – even if you work primarily in non-FP languages you'll learn plenty from following along and as a community of serious users they're quite honest about areas where FP falls short or presents optimization or usability challenges.
The vast majority of the interesting PL research in the last few decades has been in the FP domain. It's no surprise that Rust, which borrows many ideas from functional languages, is loved year after year.
I actually was part of the discussion of programming language design on that site before over a decade ago, but the anti-OO and especially the anti-C & anti-C++ sentiment was so strong, I was forced to quit.
They openly ridiculed anyone that supported the non-functional programming languages over the functional ones.
Unfortunately most of the comments are about site reliability.
This used to be an absolutely fantastic forum. I was a young comp sci graduate who somehow finished school without taking any programming language theory courses. I used to read this every single day. At one point I had every book ever written on ML (ocaml, sml, etc) and most written about various lisps. To this day I love how TAPL was written (Types and Programming Languages by Pierce). I loved the expansive nature of Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming by Van Roy. Some books were discussed so often that they were simply referred to by their abbreviations.
There were serious academics, PHD students, industry folks and newbies like myself who could not even understand most abstracts, much less the full papers.
I once asked if a new forum could be created for novices like myself so I could ask my dumb little questions. I was instead encouraged to ask my questions in the main forum :)
For a short while there was a related user group in NYC where people would discuss type theory at random diners.
It was SO good, and no doubt will be again in the future :-) I have so much respect for Ehud Lamm and the other people who run it.
Sadly, two of its best commentators have died recently - John Shutt (famous in some circles for writing about fexprs, and also a brilliant mind on several other topics including quantum mechanics and history of mathematics) and Thomas Lord.
You could easily take a server that has not been upgraded since 2004 and put it behind a reverse proxy (e.g. Apache) that gives it a SSL with up-to-date crypto.
>You could easily take a server that has not been upgraded since 2004 and put it behind a reverse proxy (e.g. Apache) that gives it a SSL with up-to-date crypto.
You sure could. You could also run it as a flat file CMS hosted across multiple fallback cloud storage providers and cached out to a global edge CDN.
But that’s web scale. The internet used to be human scale.
What I'm describing just requires a single web server like Apache, with less than half a dozen lines of config to delegate a certain page or domain to the old server via reverse proxying. Did you see the word "reverse proxy" and start thinking about CloudFare and such?
If one looks at the Wayback Machine's snapshot of this thread's blog post, the right sidebar of recent comments and links appear to be dynamically generated.
a cron-job that hourly scrapes comments and pushes the sidebar as html to s3 would be just fine, thanks. Who needs minute-by-minute playback if it requires dedicated machines to admin, and slows down delivery of content when under load.
Given the choice between running a few coherent scripts to host my niche community site and architecting a high-performance community content distribution platform with an AWS account and variable, uncapped costs, I too would choose the latter.
But that’s also why I don’t stand up a lot of these sites. Maybe it’s overkill?
Read the parent comment. People running small sites hate "variable, uncapped costs" and consequently hate AWS.
Amazon could do something about this. People complain about this constantly. The fact that Amazon actively chooses not to do something about this speaks quite loudly to their intentions.
I think LtU is fairly low-traffic normally, so even though the content is (probably) relatively static other than the comments it might not make sense for them to design it for extreme volumes of traffic. And given that this link was probably submitted to HN, a few subreddits and possibly more sites it's easy to imagine they suddenly got that kind of volume.
I see people worry about technology replacing developers.
I don't think it will ever happen because of how grossly incompetent most companies are. It would give big tech an advantage, everyone else will continue employing developers because they don't know any better.
> LtU has experienced a long period of downtime recently. Its software infrastructure was outdated enough that it became difficult to maintain when problems arose. It has now been migrated to a brand new environment. It should be much more stable from now on.
So after 20 years of the old site they ended up with an unmaintainable ball of code. Not too bad in my opinion considering the evolution of the web during that time.
user error: Duplicate entry '' for key 'name'
query: INSERT INTO users (pass, created, changed, uid) VALUES ('[redactedByBreck]', '1661955449', '1661955449', '53004') in /home/ltu/www/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66.
warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/ltu/www/modules/user.module on line 174.
warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/ltu/www/includes/common.inc:384) in /home/ltu/www/includes/common.inc on line 192.
> LtU has experienced a long period of downtime recently. Its software infrastructure was outdated enough that it became difficult to maintain when problems arose. It has now been migrated to a brand new environment. It should be much more stable from now on.
I would've enjoyed further details, but that's all there is in this post. The site still appears to render as three-column holy layout, even on mobile. Not that there's anything wrong with that apart from having to scroll. What's that red-orange XML button for btw when the remainder is lovely minimal, retroish black/blue and white?
Drupal is a heavy application for sure, but it's also used in a lot of very high-volume places (sometimes in ways that you might not expect - for instance, va.gov is (sorta) built with Drupal. As of a few years ago, all of the NBCUniversal sites were as well). It takes some TLC to get it running properly. The ancient version that this site is running (Drupal 4.6 it looks like - released in 2007) probably just can't handle it.
(full disclosure, I occasionally contribute to Drupal + work/worked on the sites mentioned above)
It's a great place for curious minds that like to explore and discuss new ideas and go down less trotthen paths.
Highly recommend, especially if you're considering to design a language of your own.