danderson

danderson, 5 days ago

I expect GNU Shepherd is still going to drive me nuts in terms of how many nice things I'm used to are missing, but there's been at least one release since I last looked, and maybe the trajectory is something I can get behind.

danderson, 5 days ago

Inside me this morning, there are two wolves apparently:

"Ugh a bunch of software really sucks to run if you're not on vanilla Ubuntu, not sure it's worth being different"

"You know what might make me happier, an OS that is almost but not quite entirely unlike every other linux-based OS, even more than NixOS"

danderson, 6 days ago

@astrid don't forget to set out a little bit of your shell history every day for the well gnome! A displeased well gnome is a significant reliability risk, as they tend to install snapd while you're not looking.

danderson, 6 days ago

And if you then still want a syntax that's "less weird" or whatever, do feel free to write a separate frontend that produces the lisp as an AST, so long as you still let me use the lisp directly.

With lisp as IR, questions like "how do scopes work" already have good answers, and you can focus all your time on new syntax for list comprehensions, while your users can ignore the weird DSL and use the nice lisp directly. Everbody wins!

danderson, 6 days ago

"We have lists and list comprehension!"

"Cool, and slice notation right?

"..."

"... And slice notation, right?"

Sigh, C-style for loop it is.

danderson, 6 days ago

@creachadair The two genders of DSL design:

"My main focus was pleasing syntax, hopefully the semantics work out"

"My semantics allow for concise, orthogonal, elegant expression of entire bottle universes. The syntax is a blend of cuneiform and ancient aramaic script, with a few anatolian hieroglyphs (ca. 800BC form, not the legacy typology) thrown in for readability."

danderson, 6 days ago

@mcdanlj Well, to a degree. The default for many decades now is lexical scope across all lisps. The CL primitive to mark a name as having dynamic binding is even called SPECIAL! :)

If someone grabs a lisp without learning too much, they're very likely to end up with lexical scoping. And if they do go deeper and learn about dynamic bindings, good for them! Maybe they can make use of this powerful concept in their DSL (or maybe decide lisp seems to have thought of a lot, maybe use it directly!)

danderson, 6 days ago

@mcdanlj Amusingly I thought of dynamic binding as a CL-ish thing, but turns out no, Scheme's had some dynamic variables since R5RS at least, and R6RS+SFRI 39 and R7RS have explicit facilities for the user to create more.

Conventional style of each remains quite different of course, but it's amusing how the surface diffs are being sanded down, leaving only the fundamental lisp-1 vs. lisp-2 schism :)

danderson, 6 days ago

@mcdanlj yeah TIL also, dynamic scoping is one of those grubby industrially handy things that I'd expected Scheme to rid itself of. But according to the change, Scheme ended up with a few well known identifiers with dynamic binding behavior (for the usual reasons like stdout redirection), and I guess having special cases felt more icky than having a general dynamic binding facility 🙂 and it seems syntactically noisier to use, which I suspect also means it's used less eagerly than in CL.

danderson, 6 days ago

@mcdanlj weirdly I think the last holdout on dynamic variables is emacs lisp. Lexical scoping was introduced as a per-file opt in with emacs 24, in 2012! Most modern code turns it on, but for compatibility with the untold decades of elisp that came before, you still have to enable it for every new file. Otherwise, surprise! All dynamic.