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Documentation: index to (almost) all of Arc (arcfn.com)
22 points by kens2 6125 days ago | 13 comments


3 points by map 6124 days ago | link

One of the examples for rreduce should be

  (rreduce / '(1 2 3))
instead of

  (reduce / '(1 2 3))

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2 points by almkglor 6125 days ago | link

Nice. Generated by hand?

I'm thinking it might be nice to somehow generate such a page by simply using docstrings in-arc, so that we can also automatically have user libraries documented in such a page.

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5 points by kens2 6125 days ago | link

I have a big Arc script that generates the documentation from template files. For instance, when I provide the examples, the script fills in the output. This helps ensure the examples actually work :-) The script also generates the HTML, the index, the previous and next links, etc. So most of the manual work is figuring out what everything does, figuring out the high-level organization, writing the description, and creating examples. Writing the script and templates in Arc is also an interesting way to get hands-on experience.

Documentation from the docstrings also has its place; I view my documentation as complementary. I'm hoping to end up with more high-level, conceptual documentation.

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1 point by almkglor 6125 days ago | link

Hmm. I noticed that some of the pages seem to have their paragraphs centered. Is this deliberate?

http://arcfn.com/doc/evaluation.html

http://arcfn.com/doc/macro.html

(this occurs on Opera)

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2 points by kens2 6125 days ago | link

It looks fine on Firefox and IE. My guess is some sort of CSS issue.

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3 points by drcode 6125 days ago | link

awesome as usual, ken.

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2 points by lojic 6122 days ago | link

kens, kens1, kens2 - do you keep forgetting your password?

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2 points by kens2 6122 days ago | link

I was wondering if anyone would notice :-) Actually, I'm doing that to opt out of the karma system.

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4 points by lojic 6120 days ago | link

Ok, I'll bite. Why do you want to opt out of the karma system? I can understand simply not caring about it, but I'm curious why you feel the need to "opt out" of it.

Continuing to create new ids seems like a pain and is confusing to other users. If someone were to want to find an old submission of yours, for example, they may have to search through 3 collections of submissions - one for each user.

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4 points by kens2 6120 days ago | link

When the karma "leaders" was introduced, I found myself paying too much attention to my standing and stressing about what I should be doing to get more karma points and "beat" the next person. I rapidly decided this was silly and counterproductive, especially for meaningless points. Since I lack the willpower to just stop looking (especially when the karma score is at the top of every page), I figured the next best thing was to blow my karma by starting a new account, which forces me to not care about my karma score. I don't mean to cause confusion, let alone start an internet meme :-)

See Tim Harford's "The Logic of Life" for more discussion of ways to force yourself to behave rationally. (This is also the motivation behind the startup stickk.com)

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3 points by lojic 6120 days ago | link

I'd suggest proposing a feature to pg to accomplish what you want without having to continually create new userids. Since he's provided an anti-procrastination feature, he may be open to the idea.

BTW I thought it was interesting that someone (not me) gave you a karma point on your post about not wanting karma points :)

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1 point by absz 6119 days ago | link

This must already sort-of exist: check out pg himself (http://arclanguage.org/user?id=pg). He's got 1190 karma, whereas almkglor, the current leader, has "only" 660. So somehow, pg's opting out of the "leaderboard" system, at least. If that's the case, it should be in news.arc somewhere (I'll look if I get the chance); of course, there could be some other reason I'm missing.

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2 points by almkglor 6121 days ago | link

Crick, I was beginning to wonder if "kens" was some sort of internet meme.

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