Thanks for posting this! Arc is really a great language - I use it every day to power my Chinese e-commerce site (there were a bunch of totally bogus complaints a while back about Arc's lack of utf8 support). Libraries are no longer really a big problem: with aw's additions in Anarki, it's really easy to call Perl and Python libraries, in addition to all of those from Racket. And Anarki has a healthily growing set of indigenous libraries as well.
The biggest problem the language has is lack of marketing (something I think we in the Arc community should take PG to task for).
there were a bunch of totally bogus complaints a while back about Arc's lack of utf8 support
Those claims were not bogus at the time. When arc was released Paul Graham explicitly stated that unicode support was not there and was low on the priority list.
I apologize for the downtime to anyone who has had problems accessing the site. Temporary outages have come along with my modest traffic spike. I hope you'll try back in a few minutes.
I evaluated it a few weeks back while porting a Common Lisp system to Android, and if you ask me, Arc is better suited as a resident language for a handheld device than most other languages.
Paul's insistence on brief symbol names, and heavily simplified Lisp syntax didn't make a lot of sense 8 years ago. But today, it's just what the doctor ordered for mobile.
If you got that error at the REPL after being on the site for a few minutes, your sandbox probably got garbage collected due to high traffic. Please see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1814494
If you got it when you first arrived or in some other context, you're bug reporting. Tell me more!
In either case, if you (wait a few minutes and) reload the page, it will probably work. Thanks for your patience.
Providing independent sandboxed evaluation for every visitor to the site costs a lot of memory. On my Linode 512, it only takes about 90 users before all the memory is consumed and I have to start garbage collecting. If you saw that message when you tried to evaluate something, you probably got GC'd.
I'd like to find a more graceful way of handling this. Any suggestions?
[+] [-] garply|15 years ago|reply
The biggest problem the language has is lack of marketing (something I think we in the Arc community should take PG to task for).
[+] [-] statictype|15 years ago|reply
Those claims were not bogus at the time. When arc was released Paul Graham explicitly stated that unicode support was not there and was low on the priority list.
[+] [-] evanrmurphy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickik|15 years ago|reply
What is the concurency story (does it have one)? Does arc have full tail call optimisation?
[+] [-] evanrmurphy|15 years ago|reply
Yes. Arc's reference implementation inherits TCO from Racket.
[+] [-] spicyj|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexyoung|15 years ago|reply
For example, if I type cmd-w (on a Mac) it types 'w' instead of closing the tab as I would expect.
I've written a lot of keyboard shortcut junk for web apps so I've had to do this before as well. :)
I was actually using Try Arc the other day to see how it compares to other lisps that I'm familiar with. I like it!
[+] [-] crazydiamond|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahmud|15 years ago|reply
Paul's insistence on brief symbol names, and heavily simplified Lisp syntax didn't make a lot of sense 8 years ago. But today, it's just what the doctor ordered for mobile.
Should be a good language to script Android.
[+] [-] elbenshira|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousDan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chollida1|15 years ago|reply
Unknown or expired link.
Does this mean the site is down?
[+] [-] evanrmurphy|15 years ago|reply
If you got it when you first arrived or in some other context, you're bug reporting. Tell me more!
In either case, if you (wait a few minutes and) reload the page, it will probably work. Thanks for your patience.
[+] [-] bhiggins|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evanrmurphy|15 years ago|reply
I'd like to find a more graceful way of handling this. Any suggestions?