Arc: the blogosphere rages
2008-02-01 / 00:04 / dave
- Arc’s Out: the original announcement
- Paul Graham’s kind of dirty: Aristotle’s Unicode retort
- 96 Characters Ought To Be Enough For Anyone: Jens’ Unicode retort
- Arc love: Zach’s IRC moment of zen
- Arc debarks: Bruce’s lovefest
- [FoRK] Re: Arc’s out, Nu vs. newLISP, and a retort to Paul Graham’s elitism: One of many threads
- Arc, first impressions: Hans is fair and balanced
- Clarification about Character Sets: Paul Graham’s clarification of that whole Unicode business
- Digging into Arc In 24 Macros Or Less:Joel Klein digs through some of the code and patches
- David Heinemeier Hansson step aside, Paul Graham is next to be voted off the island: Reg’s assessment of why so many posts are negative
- And saving the best for last, Arc is released: A refreshingly good discussion on Lambda: the Ultimate. You can tell it’s on L:tU because a lot of the discussion is about hygienic macros.
And, I’m sure, tons more. This isn’t rare–just see the title of Reg’s article–so why do I care? Probably because my own thoughts are summed up in this comment:
Here’s why Arc is great: because we’re all talking about it here and so is everyone else. It’s great because I am excited to try it. Can you remember the last time you felt that way about a dialect of Lisp? Was it recently?
For me, Lisp is interesting in an “old but neat” way, much like Forth or Joy. Python is interesting in a “useful every single day” way. Paul Graham’s advocacy of quick and dirty hacking holds promise of creating a language with the soul of Lisp/Scheme but with a pragmatic tilt, sort of the Python of the Lisp world. And his fame means people will pay attention. So while some other L:tU comments are quick to point out that Arc breaks no new ground, I think they miss the fact that Arc has the potential to bring Lisp to a newer, younger audience.
PS: if you’d rather have links that actually help you use Arc, here they are:
EDIT: fixed error in Aristotle’s title
A few useful ones from the Perl community:
Adam Kennedy: Arc is Released, and it Makes Me Happy
http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/35548
Ovid: Arc is Released – So What?
http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/35540
Michael Schwern: Arc, the “Hundred-Year Language”, is obsolete by design.
http://use.perl.org/~schwern/journal/35541
Me, I think it could be a useful start. But I’m deluding myself if I think I can seriously get into it for 18 months :-)
Thanks for the links! It’s good to see that Perl folks are not left off the “Unicode rage” band wagon :)
I thought Ovid’s comments about
cdrandcarwere interesting, but I think the reason is answered by Schwern: Paul Graham released Arc when he was using it more than Lisp. Paul Graham is a Lisp expert, Paul Graham is comfortable withcdrandcar.*Schwern dislikes Arc’s “one man in a room” (but don’t forget Robert Morris!), which I think is a pretty valid point, but now that it’s released maybe he’ll be agile and adapt the language to other’s feedback. The Arc forums are a good start to some community editing. I think that’s the reason I’m willing to give Arc a break: what happens in the next 6 months will do a lot more to convince me one way or the other. And after 18 months… well, we’ll know for sure!
I also think comparing it to Perl 6 might not be good if you’re arguing for a “diverse, international programming team.” :) Though Arc took 6 years and Python 3000 has also been stewing for awhile, so I guess I shouldn’t be so snarky.
* Though he did shorten
lambdatofn, so maybe he’d be willing to changecdrandcartohdandtl