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3 points by nupa 1808 days ago | link | parent

I suppose that's fair. I guess I'm just angsty because arc clearly delivers on the promised elegance of lisp better than common lisp does, but arc isn't yet at a point where I can just press play and start using it to automate everything. Someday I hope to get to a point where I can contribute to anarki myself and make it into the power tool I know it ought to be, but I'm still at the stage where build tools scare me and everything seems needlessly complicated.


1 point by akkartik 1808 days ago | link

I'm not following "..just press play and start using it to automate everything." Is there a specific task you're trying to use Arc for?

It's definitely true that Arc has lots of deficiencies when it comes to tooling. We're not going to fix them all at once. So if you have suggestions for the most important three (or dozen!) tools you'd like it to provide, I'd love to see them. More specific tool suggestions are superior here to general ones. "Package manager" means wildly different things and has wildly different responsibilities in different contexts and languages and platforms. So I'd particularly like to see suggestions that talk about a specific situation that applies to you. "In ___ context, If I run ___, Arc should ___."

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2 points by krapp 1808 days ago | link

>"Package manager" means wildly different things and has wildly different responsibilities in different contexts and languages and platforms

I disagree. Most package managers for most languages share the same core functions and responsibilities: import and export code (likely from or to a repo), organize code into "packages" or "applications" according to some hierarchy, describe dependencies for packages using metadata and manage those dependencies when importing or updating.

The "special sauce" between them is in the way packages are defined and the metadata, and the way dependencies are handled, and those are details the Arc community could argue about until the heat death of the universe. But ~90% of what new people will want from Arc is to import News as an application or import libraries into their own local version of News.

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2 points by akkartik 1800 days ago | link

Hmm, we've had this conversation a few times, and I think I may be unfairly holding others back. To reiterate the obvious, you should absolutely feel free to create a package manager in Anarki. The way you put it suggests it may not even be that much work for a rudimentary tool. Why not try it? Let a thousand flowers bloom :)

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2 points by krapp 1799 days ago | link

>The way you put it suggests it may not even be that much work for a rudimentary tool.

From what little I know, it would be an exercise in suffering [0,1] and that's not even getting into arguments over how versioning should work. But I still want to do it... eventually.

I kind of suspect it would be pointless without some changes to the language itself which I don't know how to implement myself yet, and I don't want to just wait for other people to do the work. Basically, I don't think we can have useful packages until we can do something about the possibility of packages being able to globally redefine things and create unintended havoc. Namespaces would be nice too.

I am hoping to get something like plugins working in the forum, though. I've already combined the repo and what was the plugin manager and I've been trying to get hooks to work through it so that it would be possible to 'plug' scripts in or out of those hooks during runtime. It might also be useful as a way to add updates by hotpatching the existing code (which is really the only valid use I can even think of for being able to redefine things in Arc.)

Maybe, if that ever gets anywhere, something like a package manager can emerge from it.

[0]https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-package-m...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11088125

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3 points by shader 1798 days ago | link

I'm actually somewhat intrigued with the idea of using guix[0] as a language package manager. It has really nice facilities for setting up "environments" that contain a set of packages, so you can use it for bundling together all of the deps needed to build a particular application. As a bonus, it uses scheme as its configuration language :)

It wouldn't solve arc side of actually loading packages, which probably still needs work, but it should work pretty well at managing them.

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[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/

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