Hmm, I'm surprised but this question seems to have never come up before over here. Google says the only mention of heroku in this forum is http://arclanguage.org/item?id=19394 which says one of the advantages of Clojure over Arc is that it can be hosted over Heroku.
Please report back if you have success doing so, or what problems you run into. Thanks!
Er, I upvoted your "sorry" just now because I did find it interesting that those archive links exist. :) I guess the Racket project doesn't have such tireless devotion to documentation that they maintain active versions of the docs for old software releases, but it's nice that a snapshot is up somewhere.
Many thanks for your pull request! Support for Windows chronically lags behind Unix, and I'd love to hear about any more bugs you run into on Windows.
rlwrap is just a little program which provides some standard features of Unix shells like commandline history and keyboard shortcuts. It's nice to have but certainly not essential.
Just echoing that rlwrap isn't needed. I actually added an arg (-n) to arc.sh that doesn't use rlwrap. I use it when running arc inside an emacs shell, because emacs has terminal integration that I prefer.
I started using ansi-term in emacs to launch a shell file which wrapped rlwrap around the file I wished to execute. Turns out that M-x no longer works in that buffer.
Finding better ways to write code that let newcomers make sense of them faster. More details: http://akkartik.name/about
The teaching fits into this in two ways:
a) It seems like a more ambitious test. If I can make codebases easier for non-programmers or inexperienced programmers to understand, then experienced ones should hopefully be easy.
b) It's a way to get feedback. It's hard to find experienced programmers willing to try out a strange new way of writing code that isn't going to be useful in real products for a very long time. Without this feedback I'd be likely to burn out long before I can fully validate or invalidate my hypothesis. But at least for me, teaching is extremely rewarding/addictive.
Oh, there's a third way: since I get paid for my teaching, there's the distant possibility that I might be able to scale up the teaching to fund my research so that I can work on it full-time.
Thanks! I remember seeing it yesterday at 1 point and assuming it was done. Didn't notice when people started upvoting it. Oh well, probably too late now.
It's possible I'm misunderstanding what y'all mean by "maze game". Does something in text mode like https://github.com/ryanb/ruby-warrior qualify? It's probably at the bottom of a steep hill with Dwarf Fortress at the top..
If text mode is an option, I'll plug my Basic-like http://akkartik.name/post/mu language. My students have made tic-tac-toe and a card game with it. Maybe we should try a maze game next. Here's a text-mode chessboard program, for example: http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/chessboard.mu.html. With tests for screen and keyboard access (search for 'scenario'). I'm sure it looks like Greek, but take my word for it that 11- and 12-year olds found it pretty easy to work with. Happy to show more over a Hangout or something.
Ack, right after I typed all this out I remembered the Windows constraint. That disqualifies Mu, at least immediately. I knew there was a reason I chose to keep mum when I saw jsgrahamus's post last night.
Yes, I wondered what to do about that and who if anyone cared about all those features. Then I forgot :/ I'll create a more bare-bones but working script today.
Edit 15 minutes later: I've made the flag to disable rlwrap '-n' like in the master branch.
(I didn't pick the original flag, so I'm not attached to that name. I can change it if you want, I just want both branches to be consistent. I also renamed the script to 'arc' like in the master branch, just to make my life easier. I'll update the instructions at https://arclanguage.github.io next.)
Now it works both from the command line and from emacs.
It's ok for me that the the flag is -n.
I think that the arc script was named "arc.sh" because the folder which is used by the news server is "arc", and it would conflict. We can either take back the "arc.sh" name or change the news server's directory to something else, perhaps "www" like in the master branch.
Edit: We should also change the flag of the default program name in inferior-arc.el (line 95):
Gosh, I haven't looked at 'stable' in ages and it looks like it's mostly unmodified since 2009, before the Racket days. It's still using 'mzscheme', which isn't even in my Racket 6.3 distribution on Mac OS anymore. And I no longer remember where we hacked Racket to permit mutable strings :/ I didn't see any diffs in ac.scm that might be responsible. Maybe someone else knows?
Hrm, perhaps it shouldn't be called "stable". That suggests a more-tested release cycle. Maybe something like "original" or "pure", or even "3.1-release"?
I like the idea of having something that's what was originally released, but doesn't really suggest that it's what someone should use if they're new to Arc.
