GNU Artanis 1.0.0 Released
137 points
22 hours ago
| 10 comments
| artanis.dev
| HN
packetlost
21 hours ago
[-]
Oh wow I wish that font was even remotely readable
reply
exhilaration
21 hours ago
[-]
Yes the crazy sci-fi font is hard to read, but I have to give them props for being unique. I even like the grammatical mistakes, it's so different than the ultra-polished stuff we usually see here. This project has personality!
reply
AceJohnny2
16 hours ago
[-]
"You have personality. That's not necessarily a good personality, but you have some!"
reply
evanjrowley
21 hours ago
[-]
The code font is more readable than the rest of the website: https://artanis.dev/scheme.html
reply
dismalaf
19 hours ago
[-]
Barely. It's extremely annoying that a left parenthesis looks like a capital C.
reply
evilduck
14 hours ago
[-]
The code font is somewhat more readable but the syntax highlighting color choices then shoot that marginal improvement right in the foot.
reply
rietta
15 hours ago
[-]
Scheme! Now that is some code I have not seen in a long time.
reply
ape4
20 hours ago
[-]
Dot matrix printer that's low in ink
reply
sigio
20 hours ago
[-]
Good thing there's reader mode, with a nice and large default system font
reply
sourcepluck
20 hours ago
[-]
Oh, I thought it was quite fun, and still found it easily readable
reply
accrual
18 hours ago
[-]
Looks amazing with JS turned off!
reply
graemep
19 hours ago
[-]
That is horrible.

I did not see it at first as I had JS off. Once I allowed JS the font loaded and .. yuck.

reply
realo
15 hours ago
[-]
It looks like the DUNE font:

https://www.dafont.com/dune-rise.font

reply
rcleveng
21 hours ago
[-]
Agree, had to pop this into chrome devtools to get through the page:

let newStyle = document.createElement('style'); newStyle.innerHTML = 'body { font-family: "Verdana"; background-color: #eee}'; document.head.appendChild(newStyle);

reply
metadat
17 hours ago
[-]
If you zoom in it's pretty cool how each letter is a matrix of squares, but agreed - very challenging and distracting to try and read when the end result looks interlaced.
reply
pmontra
21 hours ago
[-]
I've got a dot matrix printer somewhere in a box that could reprint that site with all the dot lines, if I manage to find it and connect to a computer. I can't remember if it has a serial or parallel port.
reply
UncleOxidant
15 hours ago
[-]
Oh, that's terrible. There's a reason we don't have dot matrix printers anymore.
reply
initramfs
19 hours ago
[-]
it would be slightly better if it were black background and green ink
reply
systems
19 hours ago
[-]
for me zooming out to 67% worked fine
reply
marci
14 hours ago
[-]
Strangely true.
reply
einpoklum
16 hours ago
[-]
At first I thought Artanis was a new font! And even reading the text I couldn't shake the impression that they were offering me this weird font with each character cut up by horizontal lines.

When I zoomed in it looks kind of cute. Maybe I should download the Artanis font after all.

reply
slater
16 hours ago
[-]
I know we're not supposed to go off on website stuff (per guidelines: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage") but jfc who thought this design was even remotely a good idea?
reply
mindcrime
16 hours ago
[-]
Somebody who doesn't want the same bland, boring, homogenized look that every other website in the world is using?

Personally I like a site that shows a bit of personality. It's quirky, but for an open source web framework written in Guile, it looks about perfect to me.

reply
viraptor
15 hours ago
[-]
I agree and it's a fun look. If anyone actually can't read it, the reader mode button is available and works just fine.
reply
zelphirkalt
18 hours ago
[-]
I don't see any unreadable parts and found it very readable. I guess yet again saved by not downloading random web fonts onto my machine or not running random JS. Yay! Blocking unnecessary traffic for the win!
reply
vvillena
18 hours ago
[-]
It's definitely a design non-conforming with the current customs, but it's also a fine choice for this type of project. It feels like bland minimalist design has become so prevalent that people are horrified by any deviation from the expected norm. Not everything has to be designed for maximum contrast and readability, sometimes projects require a bit of flair.
reply
masfoobar
1 hour ago
[-]
Congrats on the 1.0 release!!

It is great to see GNU Artanis still going strong.

I toyed with it a number of years ago.. perhaps before it was called Artanis. At that time I was invested in GNU Guile being my 'general purpose' programming language. I was even adding GNU Guile into my game as a frontend language. It was pretty good.

Overall I really enjoyed using Artanis. Before you had Swagger, etc, I was wrapping Artanis code to autogen helper/documentation pages... Scheme made that process far easier than other languages would.

To be honest, although I still toy about with GNU Guile, I have to admit it never was the main language I wanted it to be. For one reason or another, I moved on to other tools and languages. From memory, one of the reasons was GNU Guile was not that good (if installed at all) on Windows systems.

(Of course, now that we have WSL, Guile is much easier available)

Honestly I hope GNU Guile gets more love. If Guile gets more love -- so will Artanis. Personally, I think GNU Guile would have been better than Python but I accept that might be my bias showing.

Once I finish one of my jobs, I no longer need a Windows PC. I will be installing Linux and, likely......... GNU Guix Distro. So I will likely be more invested in GNU Guile, again.

reply
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
21 hours ago
[-]
> it's a web application framework written in Guile Scheme
reply
AdmiralAsshat
20 hours ago
[-]
> In the beginning, Artanis was largely inspired by Ruby on Rails to generate the scaffold code as possible. And the URL remapping API was inspired by Sinatra, another web framework of Ruby. That's why it's named "Artanis", since it's the revserse of "Sinatra".

And here I thought (and I'm assuming others, based on the cheeky comments) it was named for the Starcraft character.

reply
Chabsff
17 hours ago
[-]
You're not as wrong as you think you are.

"Have you ever said my name backwards? There is a strange music to it" - Artanis (SC2 LOTV)

reply
sourcepluck
20 hours ago
[-]
> GNU Artanis is both the official project of GNU operating system, and HardenedLinux community.

In what capacity is Artanis an official project of the HardenedLinux community? I'm curious what this means.

reply
ammanley
21 hours ago
[-]
The Executor struggles to decipher the font of the document.
reply
NeutralForest
21 hours ago
[-]
Looks cool but I wish it were available with other package managers than guix :'( It makes a kinda hard to try out just for fun.
reply
CarpaDorada
21 hours ago
[-]
If you just want to try it out you can compile it from source, see <https://www.gnu.org/software/artanis/manual/manual.html#org3...>.
reply
NeutralForest
21 hours ago
[-]
I know, not an amazing alternative imo as they're also saying it takes a long time. I just wish I didn't need to be all in into Guix to easily play around with such projects, which aside from that, look really cool.
reply
CarpaDorada
20 hours ago
[-]
They say it takes a long time to build Guile, the Scheme compiler, not Artanis. I can build guile in less than 2 minutes on my old laptop.
reply
amock
11 hours ago
[-]
On my POWER9 system it took 45 minutes.
reply
sourcepluck
20 hours ago
[-]
Did you catch that page there aside from the manual, where they describe how to install it on Ubuntu? https://artanis.dev/blog/build-0.6-ubuntu.html it seems quite detailed, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to get through.

Otherwise, you don't have to change OS to run guix the package manager, it can be installed on a "foreign distro", i.e., on top of Debian, or something else. Details here https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Installation.html

You would then use your "guix" command at the terminal to download any of the 29,253 packages here https://packages.guix.gnu.org/ (or just artanis).

reply
zelphirkalt
18 hours ago
[-]
You can use guix on any GNU/Linux distro afaik. If you create a guix profile for a project, it should be fairly simple to use that to install artanis. With guix time-machine you can also make reproducible setups, to ensure you can run your stuff years later.

But the most basic use of installing artanis in the default profile should also work.

Where do you see the difficulties installing artanis with guix?

reply
ginko
21 hours ago
[-]
It's available on AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/artanis (bit outdated though)
reply
NeutralForest
21 hours ago
[-]
Nice thanks!
reply
ristos
21 hours ago
[-]
Nice! is it R7RS compatible? or just specific to Guile?
reply
cassepipe
20 hours ago
[-]

    ;; NOTE: I won't encourage using Racket but if you really want,
    ;;       I still give you some hints in this tutorial. But the
    ;;       tutorial will base on Guile and RnRs.
I guess so

https://artanis.dev/scheme.html

reply
whartung
18 hours ago
[-]

  ;; NOTE: I won't encourage using Racket but if you really want,
That's two random, unrelated lightweight jabs at Racket I've seen in the past two days.

Why does Racket have this "bad" reputation in the Scheme community?

reply
zelphirkalt
18 hours ago
[-]
Not sure. I could imagine it being because it is no longer a Scheme, or the creators and maintainers do no longer want it to be seen as a Scheme. Or perhaps because it introduces differences not adhering to the Scheme standards and therefore Schemers do not like it.

I liked Racket. I only found it difficult to use multiple cores dynamically with it and its places concept and lifting and multiple Racket VMs and all that. Guile seems easier in that regard. But Racket has typed racket and more advanced macro system ...

reply
fithisux
19 hours ago
[-]
I love their homepage.
reply
bainganbharta
18 hours ago
[-]
Perhaps it's time for an eye exam?
reply
f1refly
16 hours ago
[-]
What's not to like?
reply
sourcepluck
12 hours ago
[-]
I think it's cool too! People can be so pedestrian when it comes to these things, and so upset when there's a deviation from the norm. Both Artanis' manual and the nice scheme tutorial use interesting fonts and layouts (and clear to read!).
reply
zelias
20 hours ago
[-]
En Taro Adun!
reply
rubiquity
19 hours ago
[-]
I'm sure this web framework will have many zealots.
reply
debo_
19 hours ago
[-]
We know it has at least one arbiter!
reply