What Happened to Lambda-the-Ultimate.org?
What happened to lambda-the-ultimate.org? Seems to be unreachable, and goggling about it hasn't turned up anything for me. It always had a limited group of active participants; but I enjoyed lurking and learning from the discussions of programming language theory.
I emailed a link to this thread to the site's (long out of the pl research community) founder, and he replied:
Thanks. I actually know about it and am trying to fix it. But thanks for the heads up!
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 111 in /home/ltu/www/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 31
Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 111
I used to love reading this site, but haven't in a long time.
The only other place I know that discusses PL stuff is https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/. The discussion there's not always high quality, but sometimes there are interesting topics.
Does anyone know of any other good places where PL theory and topics are are discussed?
Well, the Google Cache[1] shows it as last snap-shotted at Apr 2, 2022 05:48:34 GMT, and the captured page doesn't have any announcement about the site shutting down or anything. If I had to guess, I'd say it went down because of a server crash or some network issue. The open question, if I'm correct, is "will it be back up, and if so, when?" Not sure about that. I hope it is coming back though, as it's a site I also enjoyed perusing from time to time.
[1]: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XjPUGeG...
This is sad because it was a great resource and seemed to have a nice community at one point. I'm surprised by comments saying the language wars are over because I'm not sure this is what the site was about. Programming language design is as interesting as it ever was and no truly mainstream language I'm aware of has well defined formal semantics. There's a lot left to do!
I haven't visited for a while but for the last couple years I thought that even for the usually low, but high quality, post frequency for it the site seemed to have slowed down to unusually low posting frequency.
Sad to see it go but it might just have self died.
Didn't it go through a popularity cycle? It seemed to get sufficiently well-known that outsiders and tourists (including me) started turning up, so the core membership of PL theory insiders quietly disengaged. I think there may also have been an element of exhaustion: the regulars had debated and discussed the big, obvious issues pretty thoroughly and there wasn't enough news to keep activity at the same level. Also Ehud Lamm's attention seems to have shifted to other things for his own reasons, too.
It's actually been down for over a week already (maybe even two), my guess is that they don't have the thing monitored and it'll only get fixed once it reaches the admin's ear
Used to visit this site almost daily back in the 00s, but I thought it had fizzled out as an active site years ago?
My guess is it will be back. Just a hunch based on watching similar things happen. This post will likely result in it coming back sooner and/or having a better plan for staying up in the future. Upvote it please!
A lot of different stuff:
The language wars largely ended, with the more popular languages folding in a lot of the more (at the time) esoteric features.
DSLs have fallen out of favor.
Javascript took over for a bit (although I believe that is receding.)
LtU was a great place for about a decade when the internet was getting going, moving language discussions out of the mailing lists, which were pretty isolated, and into a general forum. It was a great place for a while, and I anticipate it might be a great one again if DSLs resurge in popularity.
Speaking of which, here is mine :)
https://hyperscript.org
I visited it about a month ago and it was up but some page loads were taking a couple of minutes.
they used too much php? now all i see is Warning: mysql_connect(): Lost connection to MySQL server
It became Lambda: The Ultimate Noop.