In case you haven't followed the saga, the latest[1] digg.com relaunch failed because they couldn't deal with the bot onslaught [2]. Whoever finds a reliable way to keep AI out of an online community first is likely to become a very rich person.
[1] Second-to-last, actually, seeing as there seems to be a new homepage right now.
[2] https://www.techspot.com/news/111698-digg-relaunch-fails-two...
Given that they wrote their goodbye post using LLMs and gave up after such a short amount of time, I don't take that at face value the same way I don't believe AI layoffs
Plus "AI" is a spectrum, with "the AI fixed a typo for me" at one end, and "the AI writes my posts for me" at the other.
I used to think that a small payment could accomplish the same thing, but X selling blue check marks proved that doesn’t help much. Well, at least it’s a much weaker signal than the previous curated version.
The challenge is any barrier to entry high enough to discourage motivated spammers is also high enough to discourage casual users. That disrupts the network effects you’ve traditionally needed to bootstrap a social website.
If I was trying to get a new social site off the ground right now, I would try:
1) secure a good brand from the pre-AI era. Twitter, Digg, Friendster, MySpace. Something that motivates a first look.
2) Require third party identity verification on sign up, configured so the social site is never the custodian of PII, though require enough demographics to support high-value advertising later. Verification is free to the user, ideally provide multiple verification options- one US and one EU at minimum.
3) Target a few core communities and invest. Find the people who moderate historically great subreddits, were active in twitter communities during the good years, etc. get them in your platform. Maybe even pay them.
That should be enough to tell you if it’s going to work or not.
I believe it’s the opposite: You have to pay competent human moderators. Like here on HN.
I'd have to read the FIDO specs, however the only place I've seen webauthn hardware pinning in the wild is with Azure AD/Entra which is ostensibly based on token GUID. If this is the only enforcement mechanism available, it's spoofable.
This is something I think about a lot, especially how one could pull it off without tearing down anonymity online. Having some sort of "proof of humanity" is a hard problem to solve.
That's lobsters I guess. AI posts got banned there after a 300+ comment discussion, probably the biggest ever on the site.
The exact rule the moderators settled on was "meaningful human authorship" but don't be fooled: a lot of people on lobsters are ideologically opposed to LLMs. Doesn't matter how "meaningfully" the technology was applied. My work was classified as slop simply because AI touched it. People referred to me as an exhibitionist and fetishist when I talked about using AI. Just a heads up for anyone who's thinking of joining.
How is the syntax new?
It looks like lispy - see the outer parens in the examples given.
I was really impressed by how small the executable file was. I’d only ever done web development with Node.js up until then.
How fast is it?
Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit. I wish this project had been a success (or something similar to it): https://readable.sourceforge.io/
Also I don't think static typing is really optional for me at this point.
In the first description of the language LISP, from March 1959 (AIM-008), John McCarthy had used the names "first" and "rest", instead of what later will be called "CAR" and "CDR".
The names of "CAR" and "CDR" appear to have come from the students who worked at the practical implementation of the LISP interpreter on an IBM 704, and unfortunately we have remained stuck with them, like also with other features that were intended only for a temporary use, until being replaced in the "final version" (which was abandoned).
Just FYI, many of these are also done in Scheme and its derivative Racket. They kept lambda (but even Python did that), but progn -> begin, setq -> set!, car -> first, and so on.
> Also my main objection to Lisps is still the horrible bracket syntax. Yes it's unambiguous and easy to parse, but it's HORRIBLE to read and edit.
I have pretty mixed feelings at this point. I don’t mind it for normal programming, but when I do numerical programming (physics models, etc.) you often get extremely long and verbose expressions that are IMO difficult to parse compared to the math-like infix operator notation used in other languages.
I wonder if we were raised on tree based algebra if math would be easier to do, or harder.
Like, solve for x.
(= (+ (* 2 x) 3) 11)
(= (* 2 x) (- 11 3))
(= (* 2 x) 8)
(= x (/ 8 2))
(= x 4)
(= (+ (pow x 2)
(pow y 2))
(pow r 2))Statements are terminated by either a dedicated graphical character, in which case it's easy to forget the character and have a problem, or by a newline (or maybe a different white space character, but I haven't encountered that yet) in which case decent formatting of code may require a dedicated graphical character to indicate that the newline DOESN'T terminate the statement, in which case we have the same problem. Having newline-terminated statements without continuation character would be consistent, but would hamper readability because identifiers would need to be strictly limited in length to keep certain lines from exceeding available screen space (or alternatively readability would suffer from lines only being partially readable).
And that's before getting into the weeds of how mathematical notation is tricky (most people have learned infix notation at maths class in school, so they mightn't appreciate how horrible it is), how different types of brackets (round, square, curly) can have inconsistent semantics, the downsides to the various ways of indicating lexical blocks (brackets, white space, keywords,...), et cetera.
The ideal programming language would probably be one which allows switching between different syntaxes based on what works best for the user (for example, someone could write code in S-expressions, another person could have that code automatically translated into SRFI-119 Wisp expressions and work with it like that, a third person could then have it rendered into something more Lua-like,...). Which is something I think the Racket people are working on, but I may be mistaken.
Is static typing that important for a scripting language? From the intro to the book:
> And to be clear, I’m not going to try to convince you to bet your next startup on Janet, or even to use it in any sort of production setting. But I think it’s an excellent language for exploratory programming, scripting, and fun side projects.
Yes. Firstly, static types are useful for even tiny programs, like 100 lines. Secondly is "scripting language" really a thing? There's nothing fundamentally different about a "scripting language" to a non-scripting language. Look at Javascript - that even has "script" in the name! - but clearly Typescript is an enormous improvement on it.
I use Parinfer, which allows me to edit Janet as if it was an indentation-based language.
Have you explored Paredit? Structural editing turns the parentheses into a huge plus so navigating feels like flying.
It would be good to know order of magnitude anyway. Like, are we talking Ruby/Python level, etc.
Roughly as fast as puc-rio Lua. It won't blow your socks off, but it's more than respectable.
These lisp guys really get excited over very abstract things. If you say this to an average person on the street they will probably try to run away.
A C macro with literals that lacks referential transparency:
#define MULTIPLY(x, y) x * y
int result = MULTIPLY(2 + 3, 4); // 14
Having a shared language of patterns and problems that occur in programming is a good thing. Ridiculing such terminology on the basis of "that group of programmers sure are weird" is pointless and counter productive.
Now if you relaxed just a little bit - the world would be much nicer place.
Referential transparency is a funny name for a very powerful feature which helps you understand what the program does better, it's not a deeply abstract thing. Don't let the name scare you.
You could ask "why the funny name"? Well, specialized professionals use specialized jargon, even for "normal stuff". It's unreasonable to expect otherwise. Car mechanics also have weird names for car parts that are absolutely essential for the car and not that hard to understand if they explained them to you.
I'm thinking of getting back and am wondering if the niche (and difficult for me to implement) features are worth it. I might be better off skipping dynamic-unwind, maybe even ripping out call/cc, in favor working on the debugability, ecosystem, performance, and package management story.
This is the average reaction I get any time I get the "so what do you do" question. I try to stay very vague "I do computer work" or something. Or I'll say "Oh, nothing interesting" and try to change the subject. Any more specific than that and they start looking for the exits.
Frankly, though, I think lispy community has benefited from being smaller. For example, even though the now ancient Design Patterns already warned programmers to prefer composition over inheritance, the OO programmers still created 15 levels deep hierarchies.
I beg to differ. There's just isn't "easy and straightforward" path to simplicity. We thought that explaining the world with "objects" was simple and instead of using already existing language, OOP took "objects" (an easy choice) and invented a elaborate taxonomy of "patterns" to work around the limitations of objects. Just look at this mess:
- Strategy Pattern: Interface + multiple classes + dependency injection + factory maybe. Bruh, it's just a function that takes a function.
- Singleton: Private constructor + static instance + thread safety + double-checked locking. Bruh, it's a fucking value. You define it once. It doesn't change. You're done.
- Observer/Event System: Interface + listener registration + event loop + memory leak when you forget to unsubscribe. Bruh, tis a fucking function applied to a list (or stream).
- Decorator; Wrap a class in another class that implements the same interface. Bruh - it's function composition. You learned this in algebra class before you turned fourteen.
- Command: Encapsulate a method call as an object with execute(), undo(), history queue... It's a function stored in a variable. That's it. That's the pattern.
- Factory: Separate class whose entire job is to call constructors. Come on, it's just a fucking function.
- Template Method: Abstract base class with a method that calls abstract methods subclasses must override. It's a higher-order function.
- Iterator: Interface with hasNext() and next(), mutable state, ConcurrentModificationException. It's fucking map.
The Gang of Four book exists because Java made functions second-class citizens, so programmers spent 20 years building elaborate object scaffolding to simulate... functions. FP didn't solve these problems. It just never had them.
Yet somehow the industry likes to pretend that every programmer knows (or should know) OOP, while keep telling everyone how hard programming is.
Those who found the truth understand that there's a reason why Lisp just refuses to die and it's unlikely it ever will. At 70 years, it is still flourishing.
Why do people write silly things like this? GoF was published in 1995, the same year Java was first released, and includes neither Java code nor any mention of Java. Java had no influence on that book.
I would dispute that this is the case. In PEGs, alternatives are not commutative, unlike in regular expressions. This can lead to quite frustrating debugging. While a valid choice, the advantage over REs is overstated.
I personally don't like this at all. This means that regex engines that try to generate optimized matching code for an expression can end up generating suboptimal code if you don't want alternative order to matter, since the engine needs to keep that invariant, except in the case when it can prove that the alternatives won't overlap, and a later one can be checked in constant time. If both are true, it is legal to reorder them to do the constant time check before the big complicated wildcard-filled alternative.
But personally, I have never written a regex where I actively cared about the alternative evaluation order. I've used some other people made where order is important but never written one myself.
I'd love to be able to tell the engine "feel free to swap the evaluation order of my alternatives while optimizing", but few if any such engines offer that as a feature.
Now I get that PEGs have commutivity problems are that are different from regexes', which make the issue worse, but that doesn't mean regexes do things right either.
Why? Anything that can be done with a regex can also be done with a PEG, and the PEG will be much more readable.
I do LOVE that Janet can create binaries with JPM, scripts, and is very portable. I once put the Janet programming language on the Playdate game console as POC.
I actually do enjoy writing Janet, but every time I do people think I created the language (I did not).
you should totally do a "Janet writes Janet" version
https://github.com/pyrmont/jeep/
It let's you vendor deps and easily install modern Janet bundles without jpm.
What do you concretely mean by this? I use https://github.com/joy-framework/joy for all web stuff and can probably get your missing features in within the week.
i watch ur streams on twitch lol
At first I said "what" out loud, since SETQ doesn't create bindings, it only updates them then I read the doc (https://janet-lang.org/docs/bindings.html) and the author is indeed wrong ("bindings created with def are immutable"). He probably meant "SETQ is set".
I really want to like Janet, as it seems to be the sweet spot between Guile, Tcl and CL (minus the speed/maturity of SBCL) but I have a visceral reaction to square brackets (so vectors) being used in lambdas and control flow operators. Same as Clojure, I simply can't get over it. Maybe I will with enough effort?
Also, what's the current LSP/SLIME status? Really important these days.
When round brackets are used, the first element in the list defines how the rest of the list is interpreted, for example:
(func a b c) — run a function with its parameters
(macro x y z) — expand a macro with its parameters
([p q r] …) — “bare” function body that starts with a vector of parameters, and executable forms follow.
Square brackets are used where elements are the same “kind”, and the first one is not special, e.g.:
(defn f [a b c] …) — a collection of same-kind parameters, the first parameter is not special
(let [a 1 b 2] …) — a collection of bindings, the first binding is not special
The only exception that comes to mind is grouping multiple matching elements in `case`, but it for ergonomics.
Once I got the logic, when which is used, I changed my mind, and ever since I’ve felt it’s beautiful.
Once you understand how destructuring works in Clojure, it then becomes obvious what role square-brackets play.
But from the looks of it, Janet has some great ideas like the one that @ramblurr shared here about sandboxing ("Disable feature sets to prevent the interpreter from using certain system resources. Once a feature is disabled, there is no way to re-enable it.")
Lisp from my understanding is incredibly polarizing and many people love it and many people hate it and that's fine, but at a certain point wouldn't it feel repetitive for statement like this and I am unsure of how healthy discussion about programming concepts can be done this way.
There are so many interesting things from lisp-y languages like Janet and Julia is technically lisp-y too and Julia's compilation to GPU is awesome and Nim too which can compile to C/C++/JS!
It's just so many interesting concepts overall in programming that paranthesis don't seem a concern to me as the underlying concept can be translated to something else, like sandboxing feature, transpilation to GPU or multiple targets!
And there are many unique concepts in non-lispy languages like golang (cross-compat, portability with static binaries), elixir (concurrency!) too.
It's just good to see the amount of innovation within programming from all spheres of influence :-D
No it's not! It's as "polarizing" as "group theory" or "set theory". Lisp is fucking math - it maps closely to formal mathematical/logical notation. You just can't "hate" math - you can be confused by it, be unfamiliar with it, intimidated by it. But hatred directed at something that is simply precise and consistent says more about the person than the thing.
This is basically a reoccurring theme on every programming forum, whenever a Lispy PL gets mentioned. There are tons of confused programmers who look at Lisp examples and "hate" it. Without a single practical experience of using Lisp. They don't know anything about structural editing, they never experienced REPL-driven development. And I'm not talking about shit like "Python REPL", which is a bleak attempt, a shallow shell compared to the "true Lisp REPL".
It takes a bit of time and curiosity to realize how enormously powerful, beautiful and practical the idea of Lisp is. And it's really sad that smart people refuse it outright, without even attempting to understand it. Sure, it may take some time to discard the old habits that took years to build and accept this unfamiliar thing. Yet there's a point, after which comes the realization that Lisp can literally replace every single programming language with better ergonomics. I'm so mad at myself for wasting huge chunk of my life, chasing things of lesser importance, instead of just figuring out Lisp sooner.
I guess, to a degree you're right - you either hate Lisp or love Lisp, there's no in-between. But "hate" means you simply don't know it. Once you do - there's no way not to fall in love.
I am much more annoyed by the random syntax inconsistencies of most popular programming languages, which are either caused by original language design mistakes, or, more frequently, by the late addition of some features that were not planned in the original language, so they had to be squeezed in with the help of various ugly workarounds.
While during the last years I have not used much LISP like languages, there have been times when I used them a lot, for several years, in scripting applications, e.g. the LISP variant of old AutoCAD, the Scheme-like scripting language of the Cadence EDA applications, or the scsh Scheme dialect that is usable for replacing UNIX shell scripts.
In all cases, these languages allowed a greater productivity associated with rarer bugs than the more popular scripting languages, like Python, Perl, TCL, bash.
While aesthetically I might prefer the look of a Python program, for solving a practical production problem I would prefer to write scripts in one of the LISP derivatives. Obviously, the productivity in various programming languages depends a lot on individual preferences and previous experiences.
It should be noted by all those who believe that the LISP-derived languages have too many parentheses, that the C programming language and all languages with syntax derived from it, like Java or Rust, have a great excess of parentheses in comparison with the older languages that had better designed syntaxes, e.g. ALGOL 68 or IBM PL/I.
For example, compare
for (i = 1; i <= 100; i += 5) { ... }
for i from 1 to 100 by 5 do ... od
if ( ... ) { ... } else { ... }
if ... then ... else ... fi
The second example has 8 syntactic tokens instead of the minimum required, which is 4.
If I cannot have a decent programming language with a minimum number of parentheses, I would rather have a programming language where all the places that need parentheses are predictable, like in LISP, instead of having a language like C and its derivatives, which require parentheses in random places, for no good reason at all.
A humourous clip: https://youtu.be/etJ6RmMPGko?si=W98LdG1jDdUCXsHV
> Why is it called "Janet"? Janet is named after the almost omniscient and friendly artificial being in The Good Place
(defn foo [first & rest] ...)
Although, this here is a good idea:
"pass values from compile-time to run-time"
Would be nice if some kind of "scripting" language be as fast as a compiled language, but without ruining the syntax. Just about 99% of the languages that are shown, have a horrible syntax. Syntax is not everything, but most language designers don't understand that syntax also matters. So tons of horrible languages emerge. Nobody will use those languages, so 99% of them will die off quickly.
Not sure if such transpilation would have a perf hit though, I hope somebody responds who knows about it more.
I don't deny that syntax matters itself too but there are some ideas of janet like sandboxing and other features which seem to me to be worth implementing in other languages too.
Personally, I would be really interested in a language like lua/wren which can transpile to Janet too.
I guess you don't like Lisp's syntax. I didn't either until I realized the key insight: when you're writing Lisp, you're basically writing an AST. Which is why it's so easy to manipulate your code. Want a new feature the language doesn't have, such as the pattern-matching they added to C# a few versions back? You can add it yourself; you don't need to wait for a language committee to implement it years after you needed it. That's all that macros are: functions that take AST and return AST, which is then executed.
And once I realized that Lisp's syntax was basically an AST, I no longer saw the parentheses. Now I just see blonde, brunette, redhead... Oops. Sorry. Wrong reference.
Really? I've used dozens of languages and honestly, I just can't wrap my head around how ugly Lua code can get. At first, I tried treating it as "javascript with no bad parts", turns out, modern JS is far, far better than 1996 JS and nicer than Lua. The most annoying part about Lua is that I never know how to format it for better readability - should I add line breaks, or not, etc. lua-fmt often just makes it worse.
When I found Fennel I immediately moved to it, even though it was "experimental". Since then, I just don't want to deal with Lua, aside from some small one-liners.
I think there's a lot of value in forking LuaJIT2 and reworking the debugging and error structures within to make it more suitable for language transparency. Doing so would make languages like Fennel much more attractive.
I gather that some features will be added to 2.1 but others only to 3.0.
What exactly do you mean by this? Speed? Portability? Ease of use?
shout out to one modern feature: sandbox
"Disable feature sets to prevent the interpreter from using certain system resources. Once a feature is disabled, there is no way to re-enable it."
I'm surprised: the language is very straightfoward, simple, very few rules to remember. It's a Lisp but with a very small surface area.
I mean, compared to other languages, Janet really is easier to lean, so I'm surprised that the book for it is difficult (did not read the book, but familiar-ish with the language. I don't have anything but praise for it, TBH).
I had that with Haskell. Although, while Haskell is too hard for me, I actually like its syntax.
Janet seems to be Lisp 2.0, so the syntax is lispy.
It seems easier to figure out what the similarities are, because I think they're pretty few, they seem to differ more than they are similar.
(I've written a lot of Tcl over the years and it'll always have a spot in my heart)
Using for scripting LISP-like languages is much more foolproof, especially for more complex scripts.
tcl if you want a UI, janet if you want an embedded scripting language.
(I'd include Rebol but it's as mind-blowing as it's dead technology from a lost timeline)
babashka did that for me.
Between babashka, janet(i discovered it just now), fennel, guile. Which one would be a better scripting language? Please tell me you experience, and if you are interested, we can work on a small article and benchmark about this.
I have the impression that Hy's user base is larger, though (not that either one is huge).
A language shouldn't advertise itself as "embeddable" if it does this. It means you can't have multiple interpreters, you can't use it on multiple threads, etc. GNU Guile does this too, and it's a baffling decision! For my field (audio plugins like VSTs), it means it's absolutely a no-go, because hosts can load any number of instances of your plugins and potentially run them in parallel in the same address space, they can't rely on global state like this. Each interpreter has to be separate.
Lua does this right, as does Python (as of 3.12, when they made the GIL local to each interpreter) and I think most of the JavaScript engines. And it's not hard, instead of a global `janet_init()`, just have an opaque pointer bundle all the state, like `janet_init(interpreter)`. If you want a global interpreter, just stick it in a global variable.
[1] official docs: https://janet-lang.org/capi/embedding.html
https://janetdocs.org/tutorials
https://janet.guide/ (the author's one)
Those two fascinating art tools got me very excited about Janet a while back.
Having tried many tiny interpreters over the years, that's relatively rare IME
Clojure: 2007
Janet: 2019
(for those unfamiliar with the reference: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat)
It also turns out that the mix is due to the standard library leaning on raw C loop iterations underneath whenever it can. Which is great! But it confuses the library's interface paradigms.
But I am truly biased. I have basically forgotten how to code everything else (besides APL family languages) in the past _checks notes_ 10 months since I started Janet. I even run a community [docs site](https://janetdocs.org/) and am writing [my own tutorial](https://janetdocs.org/tutorials/learn-to-program) (albeit slowly). I even use it in production for all new software (within 3 weeks of starting, I had rewritten all personal scripts etc.)
> Janet is simple
You can do literally everything with just hashmaps. The whole language is basically a hashmap, implementation wise. `(keys (curenv))` prints out all locally defined symbols. `(keys (getproto (curenv)))` prints the parent hashmap of the current environment i.e. all the core symbols. I don't, but you can basically do CLOS via hashmaps (and there is a [fuller implementation](https://git.sr.ht/~subsetpark/fugue) too.)
> Janet is distributable
I have like 20 websites and another dozen or so services running on Janet (with the [Joy webframework](https://github.com/joy-framework/joy) which I wrote a [tutorial](https://janetdocs.org/tutorials/Joy-Web-Framework) for), on a single free-tier VPS with 512mb of RAM.
> Janet has ... immutable collections
...not really. In reality, the whole standard library constantly returns mutable versions from everything. There's no reason to really try to be immutable at this point. Although there are cool [combinator libraries](https://git.sr.ht/~subsetpark/apcl-janet) and I've even made combinatorish versions of basic functions:
(defn better-cond
[& pairs]
(fn :bc [& arg] # names for stack traces
(label result
(defn argy [f] (if (> (length arg) 0) (apply f arg) (f arg))) # naming is hard
(each [pred body] (partition 2 pairs)
(when (argy pred)
(return result (if (function? body)
(argy body) # calls body on args
body)))))))
(map (better-cond
string? "not a number"
odd? "odd"
even? "even")
[1 2 3 "cat"]) # the args!
(map
(better-cond
1 (fn [arr] (array (min ;arr) (max ;arr)))) # (recombine array (unapply min) (unapply max)))
(partition 2 (range 10))) # these are the args!
((better-cond
< "first is smaller"
> "second is smaller")
5 3) # these are the args passed into the func! I am excited!
That's what got me hooked, in a few ways. In Racket or Go, I had to do a lot of work to process data at compile time so the runtime could literally just be a lookup table. In Janet? That's the default behavior of any `def` outside of main. The following turns a .tsv of the bible into a hashmap in the binary, when compiling:
(def verses (reduce (fn [acc line]
(let [parts (string/split "\t" line)]
(if (= (length parts) 5)
(let [[_ abbrev ch vs text] parts]
(put-in acc [abbrev ch vs] text))
acc)))
@{}
(string/split "\n" (slurp "kjv.tsv"))))
(def abbrev-array (keys verses)) # also makes an array of the abbreviation column
(defn main [_ & args]
(if (or (empty? args) (= "-h" ;args) (= "help" ;args))
(do (print "Usage: kjv <book> [chapter:verse]") (os/exit 1))) # show help
(let
[Capitalized (string (string/ascii-upper (string/slice (first args) 0 1)) (string/slice (first args) 1))
book (find |(string/has-prefix? $ Capitalized) abbrev-array)]
(pp (match args
[_ chap verse] (get-in verses [book chap verse])
[_ unsure] (match (string/split ":" unsure)
[chap verse] (get-in verses [book chap verse])
[chap] (get-in verses [book chap]))
[_] (verses book)))))
...but actually Ian Henry means Janet e.g. keeps closures synced across images/sessions:
(defn timer [t]
(var t t) # this is slightly annoying, must shadow as params are immutable
[(fn [] (set t (+ t 1)))
(fn [] (set t (+ t 2)))])
(def tx (timer 0))
# call like this:
((tx 0))
((tx 1))
# make an image and save it to file
(def my-module @{:public true})
(spit "test.jimage" (make-image (curenv)))
(defn restore-image [image]
(loop [[k v] :pairs image]
(put (curenv) k v)))
(restore-image (load-image (slurp "test.jimage")))
((tx 0))
Condensed from my longer response: https://lobste.rs/s/y0euno/why_janet_2023#c_lspe6n