Besides YC, I've been working on Arc. (No writing lately. I can't seem to focus on more than 2 things at once, so it's always a choice of Arc xor essays.)
Specifically, I've been trying to do things to Arc that will make News shorter. I'm running out of room, though: News is 1886 LOC, and it's rare now when I can find something that will cut as many as 5. So I'm going to try writing some other types of applications to make short.
I'm playing with keyword extraction algorithms in arc. Yesterday I discovered it was super easy to pull the classic porter stemmer C library (http://tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/c_thread_safe.txt) through mzscheme's foreign-function interface and into arc. That's not really about the language, but it suggests arc made a really good platform choice. Just by making mzscheme salient it's responsible for getting me hacking more on lisp.
> Besides YC, I've been working on Arc. (No writing lately. I can't seem to focus on more than 2 things at once, so it's always a choice of Arc xor essays.)
Fatherhood, Arc and YC are three things, though:-) Don't know if it's your intention to share anything about the first one, but I'd be curious if you did, and very understanding if you didn't.
Read the source code for arc.arc, srv.arc and news.arc, and you'll probably learn something new about programming. I did, at any rate. Apparently PG isn't just some investor who can't hack... :^)
speaking for myself, the idea that everything has an id from the same range and that the context figures out how to use that id was a neat thing. I'd have split it up into several structures simply because that seems to make the most sense but this works well and in fact makes the code very compact.
Specifically, I've been trying to do things to Arc that will make News shorter. I'm running out of room, though: News is 1886 LOC, and it's rare now when I can find something that will cut as many as 5. So I'm going to try writing some other types of applications to make short.