Hacker News: tonyg

New comment by tonyg in "Chicken Scheme 6.0"

tonyg — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 11:21:26 +0000

In many benchmarks, Racket is significantly faster than many other Scheme implementations, including Chicken: https://ecraven.github.io/r7rs-benchmarks/ This is because it is now based on Chez.

It is certainly not compact, though.

New comment by tonyg in "Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language"

tonyg — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:05:26 +0000

New? It stretches back industrially to the WS-* stuff in the early 00s (this is where the term originated), and on the academic side has roots in process calculi from the 90s and session types from the late 00s and early 10s.

New comment by tonyg in "TSON – A JSON superset with immutable, hash-pinned schemas"

tonyg — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:49:28 +0000

Absolute slop. Interesting that the end result, the place where Claude ended up, is similar to a (human-authored, windmill-tilting) project of mine, https://preserves.dev/ . Though with a much prettier website and far, far, far more words.

Modelling Actors with Redex: Part I

tonyg — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:43:06 +0000

Article URL: https://eighty-twenty.org/2016/08/18/redex-iswim

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155719

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way

tonyg — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:34:24 +0000

Article URL: https://maurycyz.com/misc/tungsten/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49121849

Points: 190

# Comments: 193

I-Regexp: An Interoperable Regular Expression Format

tonyg — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:12:45 +0000

Article URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9485

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705393

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by tonyg in "Regular expressions that work “everywhere”"

tonyg — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:12:15 +0000

That's one of the reasons RFC 9485, "I-Regexp: An Interoperable Regular Expression Format", is important.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9485

New comment by tonyg in "How to choose between Hindley-Milner and bidirectional typing"

tonyg — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:27:02 +0000

*Mitchell Wand

New comment by tonyg in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

tonyg — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:04:06 +0000

I will not. I refuse

I Want You to Understand Chicago

tonyg — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 19:47:26 +0000

Article URL: https://aphyr.com/posts/397-i-want-you-to-understand-chicago

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859402

Points: 735

# Comments: 486

Recreating the Canon Cat document interface

tonyg — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:42:14 +0000

Article URL: https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/updates/the-jasper-report

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45593390

Points: 118

# Comments: 16

New comment by tonyg in "Cap'n Web: a new RPC system for browsers and web servers"

tonyg — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 18:20:29 +0000

Is .map specialcased or do user functions accepting callbacks work the same way? Because you could do the Scott-Mogensen thing of #ifTrue:ifFalse: if so, dualizing the control-flow decision making, offering a menu of choices/continuations.

New comment by tonyg in "Synthesizing Object-Oriented and Functional Design to Promote Re-Use"

tonyg — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:47:13 +0000

(1998). Java existed, but neither Scala nor Java-with-generics did.

From the conclusion:

"We have presented a programming protocol, Extensible Visitor, that can be used to construct systems with extensible recursive data domains and toolkits. It is a novel combination of the functional and object-oriented programming styles that draws on the strengths of each. The object-oriented style is essential to achieve extensibility along the data dimension, yet tools are organized in a functional fashion, enabling extensibility in the functional dimension. Systems based on the Extensible Visitor can be extended without modification to existing code or recompilation (which is an increasingly important concern)."

The $200M Reason AMQP Became a Standard – A CTO's Inside Story [video]

tonyg — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:25:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcpTbK8x_eg

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45180054

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by tonyg in "Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file"

tonyg — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 21:22:32 +0000

I don't think that's right - IIRC it used to be possible to write out a file, if loaded from a file:// URL, directly from JavaScript. Then that ability got nobbled because security (justifiable) without properly thinking through a good alternative (not justifiable). I mourn the loss of the ability, TiddlyWiki was in a class of its own and there should have been many more systems inspired by its design. Alas.

ETA: Wikipedia has reminded me the feature was called UniversalXPConnect, and it was a Firefox thing and wasn't cross-browser. It still sucks that it was removed without sensible replacement.

New comment by tonyg in "Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)"

tonyg — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 08:57:01 +0000

> Undermining the credibility of computer science research is the best possible outcome for the field, since the institution in its current form does not deserve the credibility that it has.

Horseshit. This might be true for AI research (and even there that's an awfully broad brush you're using, mate), but it's certainly not true for other areas of computer science.

New comment by tonyg in "Intensional Joy (a concatenative account of internal structure)"

tonyg — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:20:35 +0000

> Static analysis can tell what forms are invoking an fexpr and which are function calls. It's not got different from knowing which are macros. That problem can be solved.

I don't think this is the case. Consider Kernel's

  ($lambda (f) (f (+ 3 4)))

Is `f` a fexpr or a closure? We cannot know until runtime.

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 21:02:25 +0000

There are no string keys in the Person example above. You could add some, though, or use numbers instead with the same host-language API:

  Person =

as above, or

  Person =

  Person = {
    @name 1: String
    @address 2: Address
  }

etc. all produce the same host-language record, e.g. in TypeScript

  export type Person = {
    name: String,
    address: Address,
  };

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 12:59:45 +0000

Thank you! I wonder if something a bit contrived such as small-caps could help. I'll experiment.

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 08:40:31 +0000

Date and datetime are left to convention: https://preserves.dev/conventions.html#dates-and-times

Decimals I'm on the fence about. Some discussion here: https://gitlab.com/preserves/preserves/-/issues/10