> I don't know how far over to the functional paradigm arc leans but hacker news is programed in it.

HN doesn't look as an outstanding piece of software.

Can you qualify that statement a bit? There's more to HN than meets the eye.

The dreaded "Unknown or expired link" error if you flip through a few pages. Thanks heaven there is hckrnews.com.

Merging discussions is not allowed.

No checking of duplicate links, if I'm not mistaken.

Non foldable threads.

No way to watch threads of comments.

No notifications when someone answers a comment of yours.

After you have submitted a comment, it just reloads the page instead of taking you right were your fresh comment is, to allow you to continue reading where you left.

Item lists in comments are not handled.

How do you format text in comments? Nobody tells you.

Basically, if you take HN at face value, it does not look like a smart piece of software. Maybe under the hood there is a mind-bending piece of AI, but as long as it doesn't care about users, users will never know about it.

The thing was written to give a linear history(if I'm not mistaken) so that when you click next page it's what the next page would have given you at the time you first loaded the page. He could just do a page=4 query string and not use continuations and make the pages the same for everyone with the risk of seeing duplicates.

It will vote for the original if the urls are the same when you submit it. This is a simple check though.

Foldable threads are client side.

I wish it had notifications.

The other items re formatting could be easily fixed on the submission page.

I wonder if the lack of state is why I keep getting the "Unknown or expired link" message all the time?

I see allot of functional DSLs (Excel for example + autocad as you pointed out).

Was crash bandicoot written in Lisp or was this just an internal DSL used for certain operations?

I don't have anything against functional languages and I'm sure all good developers should know at least 1 but the article seems to suggest that everyone should use them all the time.

There are more important things than having an expressive language, I use allot of Java which is seriously non expressive in many ways but I have more confidence in it to solve the category of problems I deal with than any other language that I have tried thus far.

Naughty Dog used an internally developed programming language for the whole game (or at least most of it.) A big part of the appeal was apparently the dynamic nature of Lisps, which allowed reloading of code at runtime to simplify debugging. This article is a postmortem about Jak and Daxter; the next page also mentions the drawbacks of using GOAL, as well:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naught...

You get that message fairly often because the implementation uses continuations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation). This is one functional style for making a stateless protocol (HTTP) into a stateful one. HN could use a different design (one with less state) and avoid these issues with a few different trade-offs. This is an implementation detail rather than something specific to FP vs. non-FP. Also, best I can tell, HN still stores all of its data in flat files rather than a traditional datastore.

I appreciate your interesting comments, but just FYI, it's "a lot" not "allot". I wouldn't normally point out a spelling error but I noticed it enough to be distracting and thought you might not know (in case of ESL).

> I wonder if the lack of state is why I keep getting the "Unknown or expired link" message all the time?

As front page keeps changing and reordering, the "Next page" link after some time becomes meaningless, so maybe it's because of that.

for the record arc is built on scheme.

You are right I remembered incorrectly.