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Comment by onreact-com | Hacker News Reader

What is news.arc?

The arc source distribution. HN is built on a dialect of scheme that Paul Graham came up with.

Arc is a pretty ambitious project, a language for 'the next hundred years' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) ).

Not sure about how many people actually use it though, HN is the only application that I'm aware of that uses it.

Not sure about how many people actually use it though, HN is the only application that I'm aware of that uses it.

NewMogul

http://www.newmogul.com/

also uses the same software to run its site.

Sorry for not being more clear, I meant anything else written in arc. There are plenty of sites that use the arc code to serve up forums with a thin layer of css changes to make it look a little different.

But this was about the language, not about the news.arc implementation.

Presumably you could write anything that you want in arc, if the language stands as an individual piece of code then 'HN' is sort of an example of what arc can do. So then the question is: has anybody written any other application using arc. And I'm not aware that that has happened.

edit:

So, after some digging I found this:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dgjgbnzn_123dcb5g9hc

http://arclanguage.org/forum

My Arc REPL online uses Arc on the backend, see http://dabuttonfactory.com:8080 (the code is linked there), but it's just a tiny project.

But yes, there are not so many projects using it to my Arc-forum-user knowledge too.

Where can I download the software? I like it a lot. Maybe YCombinator should sell it ;-)

http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.1.tar, it includes news.arc, the code running HN/NewMogul/etc and a "how-to-run-news" text file.

You need MzScheme 4 to run Arc.

See also http://arclanguage.org/install (installation instructions, but a bit out-of-date, it's for Arc 3.0) and http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10254 (Arc 3.1 announcement).

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