It is probably best to avoid any standard that involves non-alphanums, because that character could become a part of the syntax if pg feels like it one day.
There's already one existing syntax for !, and I think it's unlikely that pg will add another. We're taking advantage of something which is, essentially, defined to be meaningless in arc2.tar but which we can make work on Anarki and using it. And of course, pg can do anything he wants, but that could involve both new ssyntax and new functions. We have been warned that what we're doing is "unsafe," after all. If we do avoid alphanumerics and choose, say, djoin, what happens if pg choose njoin for arc3.tar? Or uses the d prefix for something else? Using existing ssyntax characters is probably pretty safe.
As you might have guessed, by the way, I support the join! standard :)
> If we do avoid alphanumerics and choose, say, djoin, what happens if pg choose njoin for arc3.tar? Or uses the d prefix for something else?
We say "I suggest running a poll on this, pg" ^^
But I still like module syntax T.T However the appended ! convention is winning by a really large margin (waaa hopeless!). So we need to modify the builtin ssyntax/ssexpand to ignore trailing "!" and/or standardize on my ssyntaxes.arc
OK, another point. There is a virtue in having a standard that is backwards compatible with the base Arc release.
For example, I recently borrowed classifier.arc from anarki and ran it with the base release of arc with no troubles. If people start using the ! standard, then to use anarki libs one would have to run all of anarki. Which may be OK, it just has to be accepted that this is the case.
(As a matter of style I like ! too)
(somewhat related tangent:
[One of the best of these is a Gosperism. Once, when we were at a Chinese restaurant, Bill Gosper wanted to know whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" -- GLS]
We're already not backwards compatible. Things like ssyntax.arc, for an extreme example, but also our additions of functions to places like arc.arc, e.g.butlast. That doesn't exist in arc2.tar, but we have it anyway. Anything that uses such functions requires Anarki. This is more extreme (you wouldn't be able to copy just those functions over), but not unique.
Sure, I can share some things I've learned. The caveat of course is that I am no elite hacker, so some of this is going to be obvious or not really correct...
- macros: In news.arc, they are all over the place. So I tried to code in a similar style, but it turns out that if something can be done via a macro vs being done with a function, then it is more natural for me to use a function. I work a lot with the REPL, and it turns out to be really annoying to change a macro, and then I have to track down all the places that use that macro, and "refresh" them to use the new macro. Especially with macros that call macros that call macros, and I change the macro at the end of the chain. Whereas with a function, I just have to paste in the new function and it takes effect right away.
- news.arc stores posts in a hash table. I started off modeling ballerinc that way. But as time goes on, I am starting to move things over to plain old lists. Basically, working with a hash table pushes me into code that uses side effects to get things done, like using each. Whereas with lists, the code is usually cleaner and shorter.
- repl: using the repl on the running web server is pretty amazing. Already I have pushed changes directly to the live site. For ballerinc restarting the server takes about 10 minutes, so this has been a life saver. I don't worry about "releases" at all anymore - just make the feature, test it, and deploy it.
- the codebase is about 386 LOC. For the past week I've been adding features and doing code cleanup, and the LOC keeps going down.
Any advice related to setting up and running your web server would be highly appreciated. I recently got a hosting account and was stuck trying to figure out how to keep the server running after logging out of ssh. Also, have you had any security concerns while developing your applications?
I use the screen utility. Basically, I always have screen running, and the repl / vim running. With the repl running in screen you can detach via control-a d, and then log off, and the repl keeps on running. Then you ssh back in, and can reattach via screen -dr.
I haven't had any security concerns - I have a couple admin pages but of course one has to be an admin to see them.
- Arc is a language, not a web framework. The framework part comes in app.arc.
- "It is worth noting that the quality of Arc's HTML is atrocious, but this may improve with time." I wouldn't say that this is the case. news.arc makes big use of tables, which some people don't like. But you are free to make whatever HTML you want - you get to specify exactly what output you want.
My point is that the Arc libraries do not "encourage" high quality markup. Compare to WASH, where the libraries will only produce strictly compliant HTML.
As an arc developer, I create compliant or not compliant HTML. It's the developer's choice, not the framework's job. That is nice that their are some frameworks out there that always create strictly compliant HTML but it's not necessary for a great web framework. I think a lot of innovations will continue to come from non-compliant hacked web code.
Markaby (a ruby html-generation framework) did something similar - it would raise an error if you tried giving the same id to more than one element, for example. Unfortunately, it was quite slow, and last time I checked was not being actively developed. But it was so, so, so readable. A lot like almkglor's http://arclanguage.org/item?id=5608
I feel that it's almost as good as the other solution I presented, but I wonder what the opinion of others are. One advantage it has is that it's the non-Arc code that has special syntax, unlike the marcup version where it's the Arc code that has the special syntax.
Apparently the mockup 'marcup is a bit more popular ^^
Would anyone prefer the 'marcup version over the current, existing 'w/html?
I agree that the lack of libs is a real problem. My real world example: I have have a bunch of RSS feeds, and I want to regularly poll those feeds, extract some content, and add it to my site (pageonetimes.com).
Doing it with Arc alone is too much for me - for mysterious reasons get-http.arc isn't working for me. Even if it did, I would have to write my own rss parser. Instead I am using Ruby for this, and grabbing the RSS content, parsing it, and saving the results is about 10 lines of code using standard libraries.
What kind of problems exactly does get-http.arc give you? It's a translation of a piece of Common Lisp code I had written to be able to fetch RSS feeds. The CL version worked well for the task.
In my CL project I thought to parse it manually, but I've abandoned the project after finishing the HTTP part. I've never tried using it, but you could have a look at treeparse in Anarki, if you haven't done already.
