[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
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Ask HN: What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
What happened to lambda-the-ultimate.org? Seems to be unreachable,
and goggling about it hasn't turned up anything for me. It always
had a limited group of active participants; but I enjoyed lurking
and learning from the discussions of programming language theory.
Author : psczvnadfjk
Score : 112 points
Date : 2022-04-18 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago)
| luizfelberti wrote:
| It's actually been down for over a week already (maybe even two),
| my guess is that they don't have the thing monitored and it'll
| only get fixed once it reaches the admin's ear
| u801e wrote:
| A similar thing happened to learnyouahaskell late last year and
| it was also down for a while (a few weeks IIRC). Fortunately,
| it's back up now.
| agumonkey wrote:
| ah damn, I visited it not long ago (a month maybe), almost no
| activity but still up
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| I emailed a link to this comment to the site's (long out of the
| pl research community) founder, and he replied:
|
| Thanks. I actually know about it and am trying to fix it. But
| thanks for the heads up!
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| A lot of different stuff:
|
| The language wars largely ended, with the more popular languages
| folding in a lot of the more (at the time) esoteric features.
|
| DSLs have fallen out of favor.
|
| Javascript took over for a bit (although I believe that is
| receding.)
|
| LtU was a great place for about a decade when the internet was
| getting going, moving language discussions out of the mailing
| lists, which were pretty isolated, and into a general forum. It
| was a great place for a while, and I anticipate it might be a
| great one again if DSLs resurge in popularity.
|
| Speaking of which, here is mine :)
|
| https://hyperscript.org
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The language wars largely ended, with the more popular
| languages folding in a lot of the more (at the time) esoteric
| features.
|
| > DSLs have fallen out of favor.
|
| _External_ DSLs have largely fallen out of favor, in a large
| part because the "esoteric features" that have been widely
| adopted include those that enable very expressive _internal_
| DSLs.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It is no fun writing external DSLs when you're stuck with
| your grandfather's parser generator.
|
| If we had grammars that were really extensible (add
| "unless(X)" equivalent to "if(!X)" in Java's grammar with a
| few lines of code) and composable (stick a SQL statement into
| a Java program with just a few lines of code if you have the
| SQL and Java grammars) and reversible (turn the AST tree back
| to source code) it would be a lot more fun writing external
| DSLs.
|
| Every so often a revolution gets promised, like PEG parsers
| for Python, but then people get worried about how fast the
| parser is again and it isn't like Heinlein's _Moon is a Harsh
| Mistress_ but more like Haldeman 's _Worlds_ (as Pete
| Townsend puts it "We won't get fooled again".)
|
| If parsers were easier to use people might use them 10x as
| often as they do today.
| spinningslate wrote:
| >It is no fun writing external DSLs when you're stuck with
| your grandfather's parser generator.
|
| Agreed. I've tried various different approaches to building
| external DSLs, from fully hand-written to language
| workbenches like xtext [0] and spoofax [1]. I always end up
| back at hand written, often because of error handling.
| Creating meaningfully helpful error handling with parser
| generators always seems hard.
|
| >If we had grammars that were really extensible
|
| Grammar composition is hard. Canonical BNF is top down,
| meaning alternate clauses are complete and closed in most
| parser generators. One notable exception is SF3[2] (part of
| Spoofax). It doesn't require alternate clauses to be
| grouped and so can support composable languages. It's the
| most flexible parser-generator I've used, and the syntax is
| pretty nice too.
|
| Fun fact: SDF3 and Spoofax come from Eelco Visser's group
| at TU-Delft - the same group that originated Scope Graphs,
| the basis for Github's Stack Graphs [3].
|
| [0] http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/ [1]
| https://www.spoofax.dev/ [2]
| https://eelcovisser.org/publications/2020/AmorimV20.pdf [3]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29500602
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Grammar composition is hard.
|
| Composing grammars may not be possible, but it's easy to
| define a new grammar that provides the composition of two
| other grammars along with boilerplate that serves the
| purpose of determining whether you're in a "grammar A"
| context or a "grammar B" context. You just need tokens
| that aren't valid in grammar A or grammar B.
|
| No statement in such a grammar would be valid in either
| subgrammar, because of the boilerplate, but they would
| all be trivially reducible to valid statements in the
| appropriate subgrammar.
| scns wrote:
| Have you tried writing a DSL in Kotlin?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Internal or external?
|
| I think Java is just fine for internal DSLs, see
|
| https://www.jooq.org/
|
| jooq embeds a Turing complete programming language
| because it supports Procedural SQL.
|
| I was also hacking on this project
|
| https://github.com/paulhoule/ferocity/
|
| which was about making Java homoiconic. Namely in
| ferocity you can write
| Expression<String> literal = of("Hello World");
| Expression<byte[]> expression = getBytes(literal);
|
| and then expression.asSource() = '"Hello
| World".getBytes()' expression.evaluate() = {72,
| 101, 108, 108, 111, 32, 87, 111, 114, 108, 100}
|
| the evaluation is done with the primitive interpreter
| strategy of evaluating all of the arguments of the
| function then calling the function, ...
|
| I got far enough on that project that I discovered a
| bunch of things like the expression language has
| extensions over the real Java language pretty naturally
| for instance if you have a quote function like the quote
| in LISP you can write programs in the extended language
| to process syntactic macros.
|
| I convinced myself that the idea is sound and got started
| on bootstrapping it by building a partial implementation
| (ferocity0) and code generator to make stubs out of the
| standard library plus a persistent collections library
| because that is pretty helpful for building the DSL, then
| write ferocity1 in ferocity0 wherever it could eliminate
| boilerplate (like the 8 primitive types.)
| moonchild wrote:
| Raku has an extensible grammar supporting all the things
| you mention.
| shadowfox wrote:
| This seems like a bit of a strange take to me.
|
| LTU was hardly about DSLs or even particular languages, though
| of course that came up on and off. It was fundamentally a place
| with discussions on PL theory and related stuff, with the front
| page being predominantly about current papers. So, the success
| of Javascript/drop in DSL popularity seem like a strange reason
| for LTU to stop being useful.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Perhaps it is a strange take, but LtU seemed a lot more
| relevant to programming in general earlier in the millenia
| when the programming language question was less settled. From
| what I remember the really hot discussions were around things
| like closures, generic programming, dynamic typing, etc. Lots
| of new and potentially relevant languages were emerging so
| there was just more tumult in general, and a lot more
| interest in language features amongst generalists.
|
| Perhaps my biases though: maybe there was some other reason
| why LtU ended up getting a lot quieter.
| xhrpost wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the OP content but curious about DSLs in
| web dev. Is there a whole ecosystem of these that I simply
| didn't know about? Only one that comes to mind is CoffeeScript
| but that feels long gone at this point. Going to read about
| your Hyperscript which sounds interesting
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Templating DSLs are extremely common--JSX, ERB, HEEX, etc.
|
| So are router DSLs as you'll see in Rails, Phoenix and other
| frameworks. In Elixir, the Ecto query DSL is a pretty big
| deal as well.
| evilduck wrote:
| JSX seems like a pretty common and significant DSL used in
| JS.
| StreamBright wrote:
| You can fetch it from here:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/*/lambda-the-ultimate.org
| jolmg wrote:
| Last good one is
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220318053046/http://lambda-the...
|
| First bad one is
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220407012041/http://lambda-the...
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| Thanks! I happened to have opened a relevant 2018 discussion
| link as a new tab over lunch today, and and was able to slap
| the prefix right on without scrubbing around for a good
| snapshot. Appreciate you going that extra mile c:
| benatkin wrote:
| My guess is it will be back. Just a hunch based on watching
| similar things happen. This post will likely result in it coming
| back sooner and/or having a better plan for staying up in the
| future. Upvote it please!
| abeppu wrote:
| > My guess is it will be back.
|
| Even if it's propped back up, having been extremely quiet for a
| prolonged period, and then conspicuously broken could pretty
| reasonably be expected to push participants to a different
| venue, don't you think?
| benatkin wrote:
| There's quite an area between a blog that can't be accessed
| and a blog that is at its peak. I hope it will find a good
| spot in that area, since reaching a new peak is unlikely.
|
| I'd be happy to see the kind of discussions that happened on
| Lambda The Ultimate thrive anywhere, so long as it's
| reasonably open. Stack Exchange is pretty good because it
| puts content under a CC license:
| https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing I thought there was
| a programming lanugage Stack Exchange but I'm just seeing
| https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/ - and
| there's this question:
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/309740/where-to-
| ask... On the other hand, StackExchange tends to resist open-
| ended questions. Perhaps a Discourse (cofounded by a Stack
| Overflow cofounder) would be a good spot.
|
| I'm really hoping it will come back up even if it doesn't get
| new activity because archive.org isn't the same as being able
| to just link to an old post.
| leoc wrote:
| Didn't it go through a popularity cycle? It seemed to get
| sufficiently well-known that outsiders and tourists (including
| me) started turning up, so the core membership of PL theory
| insiders quietly disengaged. I think there may also have been an
| element of exhaustion: the regulars had debated and discussed the
| big, obvious issues pretty thoroughly and there wasn't enough
| news to keep activity at the same level. Also Ehud Lamm's
| attention seems to have shifted to other things for his own
| reasons, too.
| discreteevent wrote:
| I visited it about a month ago and it was up but some page loads
| were taking a couple of minutes.
| tephra wrote:
| I haven't visited for a while but for the last couple years I
| thought that even for the usually low, but high quality, post
| frequency for it the site seemed to have slowed down to unusually
| low posting frequency.
|
| Sad to see it go but it might just have self died.
| benatkin wrote:
| Maybe they cancelled their Wix subscription...
|
| (kidding)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Used to visit this site almost daily back in the 00s, but I
| thought it had fizzled out as an active site years ago?
| mindcrime wrote:
| Well, the Google Cache[1] shows it as last snap-shotted at Apr 2,
| 2022 05:48:34 GMT, and the captured page doesn't have any
| announcement about the site shutting down or anything. If I had
| to guess, I'd say it went down because of a server crash or some
| network issue. The open question, if I'm correct, is "will it be
| back up, and if so, when?" Not sure about that. I hope it is
| coming back though, as it's a site I also enjoyed perusing from
| time to time.
|
| [1]:
| http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XjPUGeG...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It became Lambda: The Ultimate Noop.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| This is sad because it was a great resource and seemed to have a
| nice community at one point. I'm surprised by comments saying the
| language wars are over because I'm not sure this is what the site
| was about. Programming language design is as interesting as it
| ever was and no truly mainstream language I'm aware of has well
| defined formal semantics. There's a lot left to do!
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Lost
| connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication
| packet', system error: 111 in
| /home/ltu/www/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 31 Lost
| connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication
| packet', system error: 111
| kreetx wrote:
| This is the actual response after waiting for a while, not sure
| why the downvotes.
| SonOfLilit wrote:
| I emailed a link to this thread to the site's (long out of the pl
| research community) founder, and he replied:
|
| Thanks. I actually know about it and am trying to fix it. But
| thanks for the heads up!
| richdougherty wrote:
| I used to love reading this site, but haven't in a long time.
|
| The only other place I know that discusses PL stuff is
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/. The discussion
| there's not always high quality, but sometimes there are
| interesting topics.
|
| Does anyone know of any other good places where PL theory and
| topics are are discussed?
| BalinKing wrote:
| It's not centralized, but I see a fair bit of discussion on
| Twitter by following the researchers in the area.
| Vetch wrote:
| Adding cs and cstheory stackexchanges to the list.
| eatonphil wrote:
| /r/compilers too, maybe.
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