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Comment by utxaa

4 years ago

what about the current source?

The current source of Hacker News is proprietary, because this forum is attached to a billion-dollar startup incubator and there's apparently real money to be had for wantrepreneurs trying to game the algorithm, and plenty of "business logic" they would have to remove and whatnot.

The current source of Arc Lisp is at https://arclanguage.org. It isn't open source in that there is any way to contribute or make pull requests that I'm aware of (I may simply be too much of a pleb to know,) rather now and then new versions simply descend from the Lisp gods and are posted. So it's more 'source available.'

The current public fork of Arc Lisp is Anarki at https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki. It has deviated a great deal from Arc and its version of the forum is not in any way in feature parity with Hacker News. But anyone is welcome to make a PR and contribute.

The Arc language forum is at https://arclanguage.org/forum.

  • Arc is most definitely "open source", not "proprietary, source available". It's provided under the Artistic License (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_License). That license is GPL compatible, upholds the "spirit" of FOSS, and is OSI certified.

    A bazaar development model is one that takes place in the open with contributions by strangers actively welcomed. A cathedral model involves development behind closed doors with periodic releases. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar)

  • Are you still using Arc these days?

    What are the top three things where Anarki deviates from Arc?

    • I just work on the forum from time to time so I can't speak much on the language - others have made a lot of changes, the biggest I can think of being using curly braces to create tables. Arc is the first Lisp I've used, and it turns out I'm not a Lisp-1 person. I like proper namespaces and hygienic macros. If I could only change three things about Arc, it would be those and improving error messages.

      As far as the forum is concerned - I moved it into a separate folder to create a distinction between "applications" and "library" code. That was controversial. Also related, there's the skeleton of an app manager in progress that will allow creating web app skeletons, and I'm trying to get a plugin manager to work through Arc's hook system.

      The end goal (in my head, at least) is that one could install Arc and Arc library code (and possibly language extensions) separately from applications (like the forum, a blog, or whatever you've created for yourself) and from application specific plugins.

      The forum page templates have been consolidated so now there's a single page layout with a common UI, which uses HTML lists rather than tables, making page rendering a lot faster. I suspect there's still a lot of work that could be done along those lines - there's just no rational reason why rendering HTML should be as slow as it seems to be sometimes.

      And I added some of the user-side features people keep complaining about on HN such as a dark mode, archival links and adjustable font size.