My immediate interest is in "News". I was seeking a codebase to work from that would put me in a similar space as HN in look and function. I came across Anarki and was pleased to see it was related to Arc which I have recently been playing with.
My longterm interest is in shifting my mental focus to a more Lisp-oriented way of programming and thinking. I'm not a programmer by trade; I am a software tester and scripter, mostly. I use Python typically, but after working on an OS build I had to learn Guile and Emacs Lisp quickly. I fell in love with Lisp and Scheme due to this experience.
Arc interest came about after reading about it on Paul Graham's website. I'd worked through a portion of Practical Common Lisp by Seibel and decided to try out Arc. It felt right. Since I also happen to work in the Information Security space, I have ideas that for the most part feel like Lisp is the right language, but I will need to become more proficient. Anarki feels like a good place to start to get there from.
Side note: An an automation tester at UCLA working with SenseTalk via Eggplant, I came across Mu while researching alternatives to Eggplant in areas it fails to provide results, such as passing and receiving AIX system calls, or validating logs are being written to. Mu has caught my attention for the longterm, as well, so kudos for both Anarki and Mu.
Thanks for the kind words, and for the pointer to SenseTalk and Eggplant! I'd never heard of it, so I went off to correct that and ended up at this paper after a few clicks:
Very interesting. Though the thought of NASA just using Python and a proprietary solution seems worrying. Maybe it's just for the test harness and other scaffolding, not code that will actually run in orbit.
I know lots of large organizations use Eggplant but this paper is a new one to me. Thanks - had to share this with my co-workers! Everyone seems enthused we share a testing tool with NASA ;-)
I work in Healthcare and we use Eggplant to test a large functional area of our Electronic Health Record (EHR). Like many automation tools, much of the success of the testing comes down to the testing team and how they develop the scripts.
I approach automated scripting design the way I approach programming an app, so I am pretty formal and diligent, I think. Hopefully I am taking lessons learned from Lisp and applying them to my work in automated testing to make the best tests I can.
It's kismet, perhaps, but I also worked on a project called Arc some 9 years ago before I found - well, Arc. It was a build tool chain written in Scheme, developed by Gregor Klinke. I was at the height of my interest in Lisp and Scheme back then, and I liked the idea of this project for potentially building a Software Configuration Management system oriented to Scheme and Lisp.
Looking back at this project with new eyes, perhaps swapping out Scheme for Arc, I wonder...
