Lambda the Ultimate is now running in a new, more stable environment | Hacker News Reader

Lambda the Ultimate is now running in a new, more stable environment

lambda-the-ultimate.org

249 pointsingve73 comments

For those who don't know; LtU is a programming language design treasure trove. It has been around for 20(?) years.

It's a great place for curious minds that like to explore and discuss new ideas and go down less trotthen paths.

Highly recommend, especially if you're considering to design a language of your own.

Yes, along with the C2 wiki it is one of the best places to discuss classic but currently untrendy ideas in PLT: https://wiki.c2.com

Not really a place for discussion, but https://okmij.org/ftp is hands down the best place on the internet if you're into PLT.

At some point we were joking at ICFP that we might as well rename it into Oleg fan club. (I think that year he had contributed either directly or indirectly to a particularly large number of papers.)

Sure, Oleg Kiselyov, the owner of that site, is a very frequent poster at Lambda the Ultimate and entries on his site are frequently discussed there.

Oleg's tarpit is awesome. Some of my best value in learning has come from going down rabbit holes there.

... for functional programming languages, I suppose.

Other paradigms have been discussed iirc. It's not closed minded.

That's definitely the focus but they're not fundamentalists – even if you work primarily in non-FP languages you'll learn plenty from following along and as a community of serious users they're quite honest about areas where FP falls short or presents optimization or usability challenges.

The vast majority of the interesting PL research in the last few decades has been in the FP domain. It's no surprise that Rust, which borrows many ideas from functional languages, is loved year after year.

The content is amazing indeed but with a “that’s out private club” feel to it. It’s not very inviting to new comers, most of its links on the footer or get started are dead.

All in all, charming in its way. I’ve been bumping into it every now and then for the past decades, being fascinated by the discussions, while never having consider to sign-up

I actually was part of the discussion of programming language design on that site before over a decade ago, but the anti-OO and especially the anti-C & anti-C++ sentiment was so strong, I was forced to quit.

They openly ridiculed anyone that supported the non-functional programming languages over the functional ones.

Unfortunately most of the comments are about site reliability.

This used to be an absolutely fantastic forum. I was a young comp sci graduate who somehow finished school without taking any programming language theory courses. I used to read this every single day. At one point I had every book ever written on ML (ocaml, sml, etc) and most written about various lisps. To this day I love how TAPL was written (Types and Programming Languages by Pierce). I loved the expansive nature of Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming by Van Roy. Some books were discussed so often that they were simply referred to by their abbreviations.

There were serious academics, PHD students, industry folks and newbies like myself who could not even understand most abstracts, much less the full papers.

I once asked if a new forum could be created for novices like myself so I could ask my dumb little questions. I was instead encouraged to ask my questions in the main forum :)

For a short while there was a related user group in NYC where people would discuss type theory at random diners.

It was SO good, and no doubt will be again in the future :-) I have so much respect for Ehud Lamm and the other people who run it.

Sadly, two of its best commentators have died recently - John Shutt (famous in some circles for writing about fexprs, and also a brilliant mind on several other topics including quantum mechanics and history of mathematics) and Thomas Lord.

At first glance this looks like a site that should be easily cacheable, at least for non-logged-in users.

Also, I'm surprised this isn't using HTTPS.

Welcome to the web of 2004. It was a magical place full of uncached PHP applications, raw exposed MySQL servers, and nary an SSL cert in sight.

You could easily take a server that has not been upgraded since 2004 and put it behind a reverse proxy (e.g. Apache) that gives it a SSL with up-to-date crypto.

>You could easily take a server that has not been upgraded since 2004 and put it behind a reverse proxy (e.g. Apache) that gives it a SSL with up-to-date crypto.

You sure could. You could also run it as a flat file CMS hosted across multiple fallback cloud storage providers and cached out to a global edge CDN.

But that’s web scale. The internet used to be human scale.

What I'm describing just requires a single web server like Apache, with less than half a dozen lines of config to delegate a certain page or domain to the old server via reverse proxying. Did you see the word "reverse proxy" and start thinking about CloudFare and such?

Yes, but it makes up for the lack of HTTPS by using plain text passwords.

(Sorry, I initially forgot the sarcasm indicator.)

So stable it won't load... EDIT: Ahhh... nearly 30 seconds later something is happening

was about to say

I truly wonder, in the age of free CDNs and basically completely static content, why stability is even a question

People who like to program are gonna program

> and basically completely static content

If one looks at the Wayback Machine's snapshot of this thread's blog post, the right sidebar of recent comments and links appear to be dynamically generated.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220831120513/http://lambda-the...

a cron-job that hourly scrapes comments and pushes the sidebar as html to s3 would be just fine, thanks. Who needs minute-by-minute playback if it requires dedicated machines to admin, and slows down delivery of content when under load.

Seems a bit over-engineered to involve the cloud. Put it in a file on disk instead.

I normally think that. But I've really enjoyed hosting in s3. It's painless and fast.

Given the choice between running a few coherent scripts to host my niche community site and architecting a high-performance community content distribution platform with an AWS account and variable, uncapped costs, I too would choose the latter.

But that’s also why I don’t stand up a lot of these sites. Maybe it’s overkill?

It really seems people hate hosting in s3.

It was way faster to push my html than it was to stand up a server, set up https, etc, and host it myself.

But the point I wanted to make was that static content is painfully easy to host and almost infinitely scalable by itself

> It really seems people hate hosting in s3.

Read the parent comment. People running small sites hate "variable, uncapped costs" and consequently hate AWS.

Amazon could do something about this. People complain about this constantly. The fact that Amazon actively chooses not to do something about this speaks quite loudly to their intentions.

This is fair. It was my mistake to bring up my preferred method of hosting static sites, because that dredges up vitriol around that method.

My point was that it's almost trivial to get 80% of the functionality of a dynamic site with a static site.

I think LtU is fairly low-traffic normally, so even though the content is (probably) relatively static other than the comments it might not make sense for them to design it for extreme volumes of traffic. And given that this link was probably submitted to HN, a few subreddits and possibly more sites it's easy to imagine they suddenly got that kind of volume.

...except that it fairly regularly gets an influx of HN submissions.

Yeah it gets submissions, but it doesn't usually sit at the top of the front page for an hour (+ whatever other sites this news item got submitted to)

I see people worry about technology replacing developers.

I don't think it will ever happen because of how grossly incompetent most companies are. It would give big tech an advantage, everyone else will continue employing developers because they don't know any better.

In fact, generating static HTML for every comment may be more in the spirit of functional programming.

I’d imagine that the average load isn’t heavy, so designing for the HN Hug would be overkill.

Edit: loaded two seconds for me.

HN seems to have given it a hug of death and the page came back after 60 seconds completely mangled, oh the irony I guess!

That's not (just) the hug of death, it's been loading this badly for years, at least to me. I think this change simply hasn't improved it that much.

> LtU has experienced a long period of downtime recently. Its software infrastructure was outdated enough that it became difficult to maintain when problems arose. It has now been migrated to a brand new environment. It should be much more stable from now on.

So after 20 years of the old site they ended up with an unmaintainable ball of code. Not too bad in my opinion considering the evolution of the web during that time.

Does that mean the previous version was really Lambda the Penultimate?

Lambda the Antepenultimate ;-)

Excited!

But I can't remember my password. The page http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/user/password

is returning:

    user error: Duplicate entry '' for key 'name'
    query: INSERT INTO users (pass, created, changed, uid) VALUES ('[redactedByBreck]', '1661955449', '1661955449', '53004') in /home/ltu/www/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66.
    warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/ltu/www/modules/user.module on line 174.
    warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/ltu/www/includes/common.inc:384) in /home/ltu/www/includes/common.inc on line 192.

Considering half of the comments are listing the shortcomings of the current site, its design and anything related to badness of the site...

Why not collaborate and re-implement the site from ground up, or at least improve iteratively, if it's that easy?

Bikesheding is easy, doing the work not so much.

Because they don't control the site.

However, there's a dedicated forum for such discussions. Maybe coordinate and offer help, no?

[0]: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/forum/2

It finally came up but the links to older articles are dead.

Reminds me of browsing the web in the early 2000s. No TLS. Very simple design layout. User forums. Random calendar on front page

Seems to be down, I wonder if it is visitors from HN.

Tldr (and to prevent further HNing):

I would've enjoyed further details, but that's all there is in this post. The site still appears to render as three-column holy layout, even on mobile. Not that there's anything wrong with that apart from having to scroll. What's that red-orange XML button for btw when the remainder is lovely minimal, retroish black/blue and white?

> What's that red-orange XML button for btw

it's the very old logo for RSS feed

https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/c.php?g=28298&p=174225 has a few generations of RSS logos

Let me guess... they junked the Lisp codebase and replaced it with some PHP and Perl?

DARFC...

Afaik they were running on Drupal? Meaning PHP. But maybe I'm remembering wrong.

Yeah, it's Drupal (PHP)

For some reason, I feel that name crops up very frequently in the discussion of sites keeling over to a HN death-hug.

Drupal is a heavy application for sure, but it's also used in a lot of very high-volume places (sometimes in ways that you might not expect - for instance, va.gov is (sorta) built with Drupal. As of a few years ago, all of the NBCUniversal sites were as well). It takes some TLC to get it running properly. The ancient version that this site is running (Drupal 4.6 it looks like - released in 2007) probably just can't handle it.

(full disclosure, I occasionally contribute to Drupal + work/worked on the sites mentioned above)

I was actually making, or attempting to make, a joke. Replacing arguably the greatest programming language with the undisputed worst.

Ah, well...

Because I didn't know: DARFC = Ducking And Running For Cover

Indeed so. :-)

Wait is this true? Was the LTU site ever written in Lisp?

Would be very funny if so.

On the other hand, we're on a site not just written in Lisp now, but the original author's own Lisp dialect (ARC).

So I think it's more about the programmers than the language ... I can attest from my own web logs that HN gets a huge amount of traffic

It's just not the same if the home page appears within the first minute.

I feel like we've lost something special here ...

Great to see this return! I had assumed it was just dead for good.

I guess we're part of the testing team ? /s

The page doesn't load for me. I thought LtU was static content + comments and that kind of content was mostly a solved problem nowadays.

> I guess we're part of the testing team ? /s

Why the /s? Video games companies have been doing this long enough now that it's gotta be considered standard practice and just not tongue-in-cheek

The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.

I thought static typing was supposed to solve these issues!

they are using drupal and php, maybe it can be solved by static typing !

Just put a cat on a keyboard treadmill and supply a constant influx of sardines and tuna. The typing will never cease!

Wouldn't that be dynamic typing?

Well, we have duck typing, so it's cat typing. But I think it's a subset of dynamic, yes :-)

Any writeup or details on the actual setup and environment?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com