"Package managers should by default never upgrade dependencies past a major version."

I now understand the value of version pinning. But it seems strictly superior to minimize the places where you need pinning. Use it only when a library misbehaves, rather than always adding it just to protect against major version changes.

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We don't write tests just to have tests, but to verify that certain important functionality is preserved across versions. The trouble with many tests, is that they are written to fill coverage quotas, and don't actually check important use cases. By using actual dependents and _their_ tests as a test for upstream libraries, we might actually get a better idea of what functionality is considered important or necessary.

Anything that nobody's using can change; anything that they rely on should not, even if it's counter intuitive.

I don't think it would be creepy as long as it's not extracting runtime information from actual users. If it's just CI test results, it shouldn't matter.

"The trick is to change the unit of currency from passing source code to passing functions."

And it looks as though, because I created the account seconds before voting, I failed at least one test in 'legit-user':

  new-karma-threshold* 2

The stable branch uses the Arc tutorial unchanged. All I did was to make it a little easier to read: https://arclanguage.github.io/tut-stable.html

The master branch of Anarki has one major incompatibility with Arc 3.1, and I created a version of the tutorial with it highlighted in bold: https://arclanguage.github.io/tut-anarki.html

rocketnia is right that I tend to just run Arc from within its directory, keeping it alongside any Arc program I may be working on at the moment. As a result, I'd kinda always assumed you could run it from anywhere and find yourself in the Arc directory once you loaded up. Now I find this isn't the case:

  $ pwd
  /home/akkartik
  $ ./anarki/arc.sh
  arc> ($:current-directory)
  #<path:/home/akkartik>

I'm what I like to call a 'copyista': I think DRY is overrated, and abstraction is overrated, and people are too quick to create abstractions to compress code rather than for conceptual clarity. Some links: http://www.sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstractio...; http://programmingisterrible.com/post/139222674273/write-cod...; http://bravenewgeek.com/abstraction-considered-harmful; http://akkartik.name/post/modularity; http://dimitri-on-software-development.blogspot.de/2009/12/d...; http://thereignn.ghost.io/on-dry-and-the-cost-of-wrongful-ab...; http://akkartik.name/post/habitability. You don't have to read them all, but hopefully this gives you as much flavor as you want :)

NODEPS

This is short for "no dependencies". I think a lot of software's ills stem from people's short-sighted tendency to promiscuously add dependencies. In fact, our fundamental metaphor of libraries is wrong. Adding a library to your program isn't like plugging a new block into your Lego set. It's like hiring a new plumber. You're not just adding a few lines of code to a file somewhere, you're creating a relationship. Everytime I see someone talk about "code smells", I wait to see if they'll bring up having too many dependencies. Usually they don't, and I tune them out. And the solution is easy. When you find a library that does something useful, consider copying it into your project. That insulates you from breaking changes upstream, and frees up upstream to try incompatible changes. As a further salubrious effect, it encourages you to hack on the library and tune it to your purposes. (Without giving up the options of merging further changes from them, or submitting patches upstream.)

As it happens, this worldview of mine was actually catalyzed by conversations here in the Arc Forum, most proximally http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=13263. That thread led to me writing http://akkartik.name/post/libraries and (a little clearer) http://akkartik.name/post/libraries2.

I consider an example of exemplary library use to be how I copied the termbox library into Mu (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/5f1285238b), periodically merged commits from upstream (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/9ba313ab7f), gradually cleaned it up to fit better with my project (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/9a31c34f0f), and gradually stripped out code from it that Mu does not require (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/c04baba4f2; https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/8e7827dfcf; https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/547ec78bf2). In the process I made some wrong turns, deleting features that I later decided I wanted (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/10a3b8cca2) and created bugs for myself (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/3315a7d3bb; https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/0c0d1ea5cd). But when it did things I didn't want, I was now empowered to change them (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/ee1a18f050). One of my patches was useful upstream, so I submitted it: https://github.com/nsf/termbox/commit/0730826a07. I would be in no position to submit that patch if I hadn't taken the trouble to understand termbox's internals. That's another benefit of copying and privately forking libraries: it makes you a better citizen of the open source world, because open source depends on eyeballs, and using a library blindly helps nobody except your (extremely short-term) self.

More broadly, Mu is suffused with this ethos. My goal is that if you have a supported platform you should be able to run it with three commands:

  $ git clone https://github.com/akkartik/mu
  $ cd mu
  $ ./mu

Mu's also geared to spread this idea. I want to build an entire software stack in which any part is comprehensible to any programmer with an afternoon to spare (http://akkartik.name/about). Which requires having as little code as possible, because every new dependency is a source of complexity if you're building for readers rather than users. In chasing this goal I'm very inspired by OpenBSD for this purpose. It's the only OS I know that allows me to recompile the entire kernel and userland in 2 commands (https://github.com/akkartik/mu/wiki/Building-OpenBSD-on-Open...). People should be doing this more often! I think I'm going to give up Mu and build my next project atop OpenBSD. But that's been slow going.

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Ah, here's an old HN thread where I managed to combine both these ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11158357#11189308