Python + Lisp = Thnake (live-CD Linux distribution with pre-configured dev env) | Hacker News Reader

Python + Lisp = Thnake (live-CD Linux distribution with pre-configured dev env)

jasonfruit.com

19 pointsalrex02112 comments

I don't know jack diddly about the project, but good lord do I love the name.

Someone should put clojure on this.

someone should put tail recursion in clojure..

It's there with e.g. the recur kludge (which some people prefer, instead of the implicit style where if you get the position wrong you blow your stack) and real support is waiting for support in the JVM, which with any luck will happen in the next version of Java.

I find clojure's current approach to tail recursion to work very well. Maybe I'm just not functional enough, but I'm not sure why function calls that don't push a stack frame should be done the same way as a regular function call. Doing a tail call explicitly is fine, and seems to work okay.

Why is the demand for tail calls so great?

It has a certain elegance and conciseness and having different syntax for recur and the mutual recursion trampoline is perhaps more than inelegant.

Every little thing you add to a language makes it that much more difficult to remember and correctly use everything. The closer Clojure stays to Scheme in the Scheme to Common Lisp continuum the better.

An interesting idea, but this seems more like something intended for the author's personal use. Pretty much anybody else is going to want different libraries, especially for Python, which has many GUI and web dev packages. So you'll end up installing your own stuff anyway...

I can see a number of uses for something lilke this, but I don't understand why someone would put web-dev libraries on a live-cd. There are so many better uses.

I don't really understand the point. Seems like a set of reliable install scripts for various distributions would have a much bigger impact.

True, but that's a lot of never ending work. If you control the horizontal and vertical you can I imagine without too much work achieve this narrow "it just works" goal.

One of my current projects is targeted at Xen; I can see myself taking the same approach someday.

oh god how do i save

Puppy Linux (on which Thnake is based) recommends thumb drive, although it sounds like mounted hard drives or network storage are also feasible:

http://puppylinux.org/main/index.php?file=Overview%20and%20G...

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