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20:38:22
aeth
Coalton and Shen both compile to Common Lisp, and there's a not-very-popular flavor of Clojure that does, too.
20:38:52
aeth
There's like 4 languages that compile to Lua. Obviously a bazillion that compile to JavaScript.
20:39:20
aeth
Several languages are built on Racket and Racket in turn compiles to a different Scheme these days.
20:39:43
aeth
Clojure was huge back in the day. It was just mostly 2008-2015 or so, before hype moved to static typing.
20:41:57
gentk
At least I take a look at what is happening in CL and scheme communities, and the activity in clojure seems to be higher in general. Seemingly better quality new libraries etc.
20:43:24
gentk
for some reason the whole community prefers a closed bubble (clojurians slack) to share stuff, which I found a bit weird, but other than that it seems like a very healthy community
20:43:41
aeth
And nobody wants to think where the abomination of Autolisp fits in the popularity hierarchy
20:43:50
aeth
Because nobody who uses Autolisp follows any of the conventions that everyone else follows
20:44:37
aeth
it'd be like if there was a C-syntax curly-bracket community that always wrote one-liners between the brackets or something
20:45:08
aeth
{ int x = 42; x++; int y = x; return y } // as idiomatic for that community, not reducing it to one line for IRC
20:45:46
aeth
Actually, I think the weirdest C is actually in the implementation of one of those array programming languages (J? K? L? M? N? O? P?) where they write it as if it's one of those languages, e.g. single-character names.
20:53:00
TMA
gentk: ah, that slack preference would explain why clojure community seems dead/on life support when viewed only through the IRC lens
20:54:41
gentk
TMA: That's what I've told them when I joined the community. There's a lot of valuable stuff that is posted there which would have a lot more googlability in a traditional forum
20:55:45
aeth
gentk: Well, these days, new programming communities use Discord as the undiscoverable, hidden, insular chat program.
20:56:06
aeth
I guess those languages will stay on Discord forever, like how Clojure is on Slack forever, even after a new shiny chat program comes along.
20:56:56
aeth
Forums, however, are dead. Reddit killed them all and then Reddit decided that brainrot (short portrait videos, etc.) was more profitable than actually completing the replacement of web forums by adding trivial web forum features like subforums.
20:57:31
aeth
So the end result is a bunch of forums shut down to "use our [dead] subreddit" (because Reddit is for memes and brainrot, not forum-style stuff)
20:58:18
aeth
it's just a clone of late-stage-Reddit complete with images in the comments taking up like 30 lines of text worth of space
20:58:44
gentk
basically the size where you could catch up with almost everything. A linear reading experience.
20:59:11
gentk
for some sizes reddit does have benefits, but then it started to get used for everything
20:59:19
TMA
aeth: don't forget porn, that's also big on reddit. bonus points for images fitting both categories
20:59:33
aeth
gentk: Yes, Reddit-style threading scales, but that's a bad thing because scale is bad no matter what. The natural conversation-limited nature of linear kept communities at a feasible size.
21:00:08
aeth
Hacker News is pretty bad these days. The only Reddit-style threading sites that have managed to stay OK are lobsters and tildes for now.
21:00:54
aeth
TMA: Nah, porn is part of the social media rugpull. Good to get people to go there, but then you want to start to slowly restrict it and shut it down (too quickly and your site Tumblrs itself)
21:03:05
aeth
tux0r: Hacker News used to sometimes surface good compiler/language/Lisp stuff, but now it's pretty rare. Too much AI. The AI conversations are uninteresting because it's the same arguments over and over again, while the AI-related posts are uninteresting because they're all three sentence prompts turned into a lengthy AI-written —-filled post.
21:04:15
aeth
And all of the AI announcements are all "you can vibe code better now", which is like if a gaming site suddenly started being half-filled with FPS aimbot press releases or something. I can aim by myself, I can code by myself.
21:08:07
aeth
I'm just disappointed that other visual/low/no code solutions never really got the VC craze behind it
21:08:15
tux0r
health AI, established in the 50s or so, just does its job without a whole religion built around irt
21:08:19
aeth
Imagine if Hacker News had a phase where everyone was talking about how much you can get done in Scratch or something
21:09:22
aeth
tux0r: Generative AI is extremely useful, although of dubious ethical and legal standing (it's basically just plagiarizing the whole internet to produce competing products to the things that it plagiarized in its current state... if the legal system wasn't pay-to-win, it would've been shut down by the smaller-than-tech copyright lobby by now).
21:09:40
aeth
tux0r: It's just not $1+ trillion useful (that would require automating at least all of software engineering, and probably a bunch of other professions).
21:10:36
aeth
The stuff it's most useful on are stuff that aren't particularly large markets (replacing stock photography?)
21:11:11
aeth
Also e.g. natural language translation is probably a dead field now that we have a "Google Translate" 4.0 (5.0? 6.0?) that's good enough, but, again, not a hugely profitable market.
21:16:44
aeth
I mean, just sum together the market caps of the stuff that it wants to replace and you probably won't get $1 trillion unless you say "oh, yeah, it replaces Google" (trivial > $1 trillion) or whatever
21:20:35
gentk
on natural language translation deepl was already doing quite well with more efficient/targeted machine learning techniques
21:22:45
gentk
for the languages it did support, deepl was significantly superior to google even 6-7 years ago