GNU Artanis – A fast web application framework for Scheme

(artanis.dev)

128 points | by smartmic 4 hours ago ago

24 comments

  • rolandog 3 hours ago

    Beautiful and clean website (loads well without JS and fonts); not sure why some people are reacting negatively to some poetry... I swear, HN crowd can be often worse than Mean Girls.

    About Artanis itself... It looks really cool! Scheme is such a nice language to code and hack with; but, how safe would it be to expose it directly?

    I see they are dogfooding on the Guix packages website, so... I'm guessing it's pretty well tested.

    • Tadpole9181 34 minutes ago

      > not sure why some people are reacting negatively to some poetry...

      It's a weird time for art. A lot of people's immediate reaction to genuine expression these days is "cringe".

      I suppose that's always been the case to some degree, but it feels more prevalent now with internet-level attention span and broadcasting breadth.

    • neilv 2 hours ago

      > Scheme is such a nice language to code and hack with; but, how safe would it be to expose it directly?

      If you have really good Scheme programmers, who know their system, and built it competently, it's probably safer to expose that than your average conventional system.

      (Example: A system in Scheme was the first to get a particular certification for sensitive data hosting on cloud servers. Partly because the very small team that developed it knew the stack inside and out, and could do whatever needed to be done, in a smart way.)

      (Meanwhile, say, a consulting firm-led team who got a contract for a comparably complex system, and billed for 10 or 100 times the seat-warmers, with huge and ridiculously complex stacks they didn't understand... would just flounder, focus on appearances in sprint tasks, and churn out things implemented in poor ways, and with a large number of vulnerabilities, and probably take a lot longer before they could deliver a system that would survive the first day of use.)

      • zeroq 13 minutes ago

        In my experience this sentiment could be applied to anything. It's more about getting paid for "getting thing done" versus "working on thing".

        I have particular personal experience with an app that could be done within several months with handful of people but was developed over several years by team of 50. I was flabbergasted at first but you need to understand politics first.

      • evertedsphere 40 minutes ago

        > A system in Scheme was the first to get a particular certification for sensitive data hosting on cloud servers.

        What system was this?

    • 29athrowaway an hour ago

      - The text is unusually large.

      - Irrelevant noise at the beginning of the landing page.

      - "What is it" is under the FAQ section, which has a heading that is the same size as the parent heading.

      - It consumes all horizontal space.

      • fiddlerwoaroof an hour ago

        The very first text on the page tells you what it is: “ GNU Artanis - A fast web application framework for Scheme”

      • plumbees an hour ago

        I can finally read a website without squinting despite having glasses on already. Yay!

        • busterarm 29 minutes ago

          As a newly old, I really appreciate websites with large text.

  • shakna 3 hours ago

    I've used this in production once.

    Mostly able to because Guile's web server is standard, and if you need to bypass the framework, you can rather easily.

    It's more than fast enough for most people's needs. Flexible, because Scheme, and Artanis' design will be familiar to all the Flask/etc devs.

  • iameli 3 hours ago

    Is this named after the Protoss Executor Artanis?

    • shakna 3 hours ago

      > Has a Sinatra-like style route, hence the name "Artanis" ;-)

    • stackghost 3 hours ago

      "Artanis" backwards is "Sinatra" which happens to be the name of a popular Ruby gem for web dev.

      • vincent-manis an hour ago

        And was a gag in the ancient Dick van Dyke show, where Dick's character gets a painting signed by `Artanis', and thinks it worthless, until someone spells it backward.

  • aaron_m04 3 hours ago

    Projects using it is 404.

  • neilv 2 hours ago

    Just a comment on APIs in Scheme...

    If you're defining a Web server route handler, it's reasonable to do it as you would in most languages, like this package's example:

        (get "/hello/:who"
          (lambda (rc)
            (format #f "<p>hello ~a</p> " (params rc "who"))))
        
    But the following might be easier syntax extension in Scheme, in which each variable URL path element can be mapped for the programmer directly to a Scheme variable binding in the closure:

        (define-http-get-route ("/hello/" who)
          (format #f "<p>hello ~a</p> " who))
    
    (Of course, you'd also have a function to sanitize/escape `who` before injecting it into the HTML.)
  • smcl 3 hours ago

    > Sailing to /dev/null

    > That is no future for mediocre coder.

    > The hacker is one another's arm. Codes in the editors.

    > Those dying generations - at their song.

    aye ok settle down, let's just see the code please

  • alphazard 3 hours ago

    This looks neat (I like scheme), but if you really want people to use your framework, the landing page should not start with cryptic nonsense. Is it supposed to be a poem? I don't even know. Consider me filtered.

    • coderatlarge 3 hours ago

      the page also says

      “ GNU Artanis was Certificated as Awesome Project at 2013 Lisp in summer projects “

      so i guess this is not news?

      • mindcrime 2 hours ago

        > so i guess this is not news?

        Does it matter? Despite the name of the site, not everything that is posted/discussed here needs to be "news". Far from it, in fact.

      • tjr 3 hours ago

        It looks like the latest 1.3.0 release just happened a few days ago, but that isn't clear from (or even stated on) the linked web page.