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It does work on my Mac with Racket v8.0. I'm at commit 009a8d9388 in the Anarki repo (May 9)

I'm not sure what's going on! Did it used to work for you on Windows 10? How long is the possible window of breakage?

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2 points by jsgrahamus 1396 days ago | link

Thanks for checking in. The dates of the files in the directories is 2018. I downloaded recent version and gave it a spin: It took about a minute to start up and then I ran (app-start "news") and it started the news app.

Thanks again.

Steve

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2 points by jsgrahamus 1396 days ago | link

Odd that downloading it again caused it to work.

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Do you have much experience programming? That'll help tailor advice for your situation.

The first step is to get Arc running like you asked before. After that the next step would be to go through the steps in how-to-run-news in the Arc directory.

There's a lot involved in maintaining a site for a community at this point in time. A good language can only help so much.

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2 points by Jonesk79 1408 days ago | link

Yes, I have experience programming from years ago and recently started learning Python until I happened across Arc. I think it's neat and would be great for my project. Where is the how-to-run news in case I don't find it myself? Thanks

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1 point by akkartik 1408 days ago | link

It's right inside the arc3.2.tar file. Just cd into the arc3.2 directory after you expand it, and you should see it. It looks like this: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/official/how-to-r...

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2 points by Jonesk79 1408 days ago | link

I run this code and check http://localhost:8080/ but nothing loads.

  arc> load "news.arc"
 
  #<procedure: load>

  arc> "news.arc"
  
  arc> nsv

  #<procedure:zz>

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3 points by Jonesk79 1408 days ago | link

I ran (load "news.arc") this time and it prints out a list of items prefixed with * redefining and 'nil' returns after the last item.

However, nothing happens at localhost8080 and when I run (nsv) it gives this message:

  The syntax of the command is incorrect.

  The syntax of the command is incorrect.
  
  The syntax of the command is incorrect.
  
  The syntax of the command is incorrect.

  'rm' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
  operable program or batch file.

  load items: Error: "directory-list: could not open 
  directory\n  path: C:\\Users\\Hopet Ma'at 
  Amun\\Desktop\\arc3.2\\arc\\news\\story\\\n  system error: 
  The system cannot find the path specified.; win_err=3"

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2 points by rocketnia 1408 days ago | link

There are a number of system calls like (system "rm ...") in news.arc and other places. These run shell commands, and most of them only work on a POSIX shell. I'm sorry to say, I'm not sure anyone has ever gone through all these calls and made them portable so that news.arc can run on Windows.

If you use the Anarki master branch, I think a few of those calls have been replaced with more portable code, but not all of them. I've at least been able to get a server started up and showing content before.

I used to use Arc on Windows quite a bit, and I tried the web server a couple of times, but I never really used the web server. Nowadays I still use Windows, but I do a lot of my programming projects inside a Linux Mint VM using VirtualBox. I think running news.arc inside a VM like that would be one of the easier ways to get it working. Of course, learning to set up a VM like that could be a lot to figure out, but at least that's something a lot of people out there have already written up tutorials for.

Another possibility is to look for one of the many Hacker News clones that people have whipped up in other languages. You probably won't get to use Arc that way, but some of those clones may be better architected and better maintained than news.arc.

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2 points by Jonesk79 1407 days ago | link

I have found this and it looks promising. https://coderrocketfuel.com/courses/hacker-news-clone

My only concern is that it won't use the news.arc algorithm. In that case, I think I'd take the time to learn how to set up a virtual environment.

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2 points by akkartik 1408 days ago | link

Ah, news.arc doesn't work on Windows, unfortunately.

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3 points by krapp 1407 days ago | link

The Anarki fork should work, I run it in Windows.

https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

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2 points by Jonesk79 1407 days ago | link

Ok, thanks

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2 points by akkartik 1409 days ago | link | parent | on: Arc Installation

It looks like you're trying to run racket -f as.scm inside Racket. It's just a terminal command. Open a new terminal (unrelated to Racket) and type it in there.

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2 points by Jonesk79 1408 days ago | link

I got it set up in the regular terminal by adding the path to environment variables, however, it gave me the same message as before. Is there something more I should be doing with the untarred folder, maybe?

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1 point by akkartik 1408 days ago | link

I'm not sure where the disconnect lies. I think we might need to discuss details more explicitly. What OS are you on?

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2 points by Jonesk79 1408 days ago | link

You're a great help, thanks! I was typing in Racket before racket -f as.scm, when I don't need to

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I don't think so, since OP mentioned Arc 3.2 without any Nginx. I just tried it and I'm able to reproduce this issue with just the official branch in anarki (which is identical to Arc 3.2) without any Nginx.

Arc 3.2 doesn't get very frequent updates, but we should probably fix this in the stable branch. It shows the same error, and also has some errors in the log. Unfortunately I'm not sure when I can get to this. I've been having some RSI issues and time at the computer is limited at the moment.

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Thanks for doing this. https://docs.racket-lang.org/punctaffy/motivation.html in particular really helps understand where you're going with this.

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1 point by akkartik 1503 days ago | link | parent | on: Does Arc have a language reference?

Indeed, that looks wonderful!

Do you have any open questions?

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Thanks for raising these questions! A few random thoughts that immediately occur to me:

My general bias is that CI infrastructure is uneconomic for this project[1], given the amount of effort I'm willing to put into Anarki at this point. But I have absolutely no objection to others continuing to maintain it.

I'd be fine with having a more complex set of instructions for contributors than newcomers. I'm totally willing to perform those commands for myself when I make changes to Anarki.

I'd also be ok with undoing some of this complexity if you want to do that, though I don't mean to push for that in any way.

I think it's also not super onerous to require people to manually update the docs when making changes. That way we can get rid of gh-pages, and configure Github to just rebuild docs from the trunk branch. That eliminates one use case for CI.

Your final proposal is also fine, though as you mentioned someone would have to implement it.. :)

[1] As context, I also plan to remove CI from the project I _do_ actively work on.

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2 points by rocketnia 1530 days ago | link

I appreciate your frankness, lol. Anarki maintenance happens whenever we feel like it. :-p I have been feeling an inkling of an Arc urge lately, hence this post, but I have other priorities right now that this is basically procrastination from.

What do you mean by getting GitHub to build docs from the trunk branch? That's what that part of the CI script is there to simulate; I think there's still no actual way to configure GitHub Pages to build from anything but a `gh-pages` branch or a `<username>.github.io` repository.

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2 points by akkartik 1529 days ago | link

A few years ago GitHub added the ability to specify a branch for a project. See the GitHub pages section of https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/settings

I have a site at http://akkartik.github.io/mu but it's served directly from the main branch. There's no gh-pages branch at https://github.com/akkartik/mu

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2 points by rocketnia 1528 days ago | link

Oh, I see, you're right. I checked that settings page, but the big blank "social preview" image made me think I was at the end of the page, so I forgot I could scroll down. That's interesting.

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2 points by krapp 1529 days ago | link

>I think it's also not super onerous to require people to manually update the docs when making changes.

It really isn't. I need to add documentation for a lot of things.

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2 points by krapp 1528 days ago | link

This is a bit off topic but what happened to the projects tab for the repo? I had a vaguely organized project for the forum up there.

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2 points by akkartik 1528 days ago | link

Oh sorry, I cleaned up some tabs because I saw tabs overflowing into a menu on the right. I'll restore it.

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3 points by krapp 1528 days ago | link

Ok thanks.

Also, hey everybody, there's a project tab for the forum on the repo. Feel free to add to it, or whatever.

I'll get around to working on it again sooner or later.

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HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25603559

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New 2-minute video: support for strings, arrays and file handles that starts to give this the feel of a shell language.

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-2min-2020-10-27

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2 points by rocketnia 1579 days ago | link

Did you build all these dialogue boxes yourself too? Very snazzy. :D

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2 points by akkartik 1577 days ago | link

https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/3d31467c0d/apps/tile/box... :D

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1 point by akkartik 1602 days ago | link | parent | on: Observations on homoiconicity

You might enjoy this talk which mentions this equation:

    code = AST + formatting/comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tCY72t1nL0

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2 points by Mitranim 1601 days ago | link

I might check it out later, but is there a gist in text form somewhere?

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