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damelang
nile
Common Lisp2013–2024
damelang / nile

nile

Discover this repository through its Hacker News conversations.

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
17Distinct people
20Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
740GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A public description has not been verified.

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:00:59 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year20 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-07-31 02:43:06 UTC to 2024-03-07 03:26:15 UTC.

012342013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

3 sources
mpweiher·Dec 23, 2013
Reactive Programming[1] (not FRP): Look up ThingLab[2][3]. Done in 1978 on Smalltalk by Alan Borning. Alan Kay typically points to Sutherland's Sketchpad (1963)[4] as inventing objects, computer graphics and constraint programming. I have to admit I don't understand the hype over FRP. I mean it's great that you can now do reactive programing in FP as well, but it's not like this hasn't been around for ages. Anyhow, what Alan does is not co-opting, it is pointing out all the great work that has been forgotten and then reinvented, usually badly, in the hope that someone will finally do a better job than what went before. See also Brett Victor's talk "The Future of Programming"[5]. Brett works for Alan now. Others have pointed out VPRI[6]. Open Source programming languages that came out of there include OMeta (OO pattern matching)[7]
Read the rest
, Nile (dataflow for graphics)[8], Maru (metacircular S-Expr. eval)[9], KScript (FRP)[10], etc. In terms of publishing papers: he's 73 for pete's sake. He doesn't have to publish papers, or do anything he doesn't absolutely want to. But in fact he doesn't just rest on his awards (Turing...) or patents or having had a hand in creating just about every aspect of what we now consider computing. He's still going strong. So yes, there is a peanut gallery. You just may be confused as to who is sitting in it and who is on stage changing the world. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_programming [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThingLab [3] http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/videos/thi... [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI [5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4 [6] http://www.vpri.org [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta [8] https://github.com/damelang/nile [9] http://piumarta.com/software/maru/ [10] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2509590
In Was Alan Kay wrong? And why does that matter?
spion·Nov 5, 2013
I'm always torn whenever I see a Bret Victor talk. On one hand, I agree with almost everything he says in the talk, amazed by the prototype tools he presents, the concepts he discovered to make those tools usable. And I can see that in each talk he has some new insights to present, deeper connections, better and more general creations - and thats really exciting. On the other hand, his attitude that he doesn't plan to turn the tools into products, that they're just prototypes, that he expects someone else to come and create actual products - that rubs me the wrong way. The thing is, we've found excellent collaboration platforms exactly for these kind of prototypish things that we don't plan to make a product of yet we would like other people to toy around with the general idea. The most recent incarnation is GitHub. So why not publish som
Read the rest
e of these prototypes? Its not about the code, its about forming a community that will build upon those ideas. Its about kick-starting the construction, setting it in motion. As far as I can see, that is what Victor is hoping for - people taking these ideas close to their hearts and building them in reality. Is the idea not ready yet? Not exactly polished enough or general enough to be published? The visualization drawing / exploration tool looks like an awesome start to me... I don't understand. Edit: Oh wait. https://github.com/damelang/nile contains the presented Nile viewer. Nevermind.
In Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

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