Sounds like the community is not very happy, for various reasons (some valid).
If I were an arclanguage community member reading this and seeing pg's responses, I would not feel better.
The whole situation sounds like a big mess especially considering lisp's history of "community fragmentation and trivially incompatible implementations."
What you call fragmentation in the Lisp community I actually consider a sign of health. It was a sign of the vitality of the Lisp community in the 70s and 80s that people keep forking off new dialects. That was actually something I was hoping to encourage more of with Arc.
CL was in my opinion (and in the opinion a lot of Lisp hackers) a disaster in that respect. Before CL, Lisp had evolved rapidly by spawning new dialects. Once CL was established
as the standard, this evolution practically stopped.
I predict that Paul will end up abandoning Arc and restarting his quest for the perfect programming language anew. It seems to happen with other successful languages - Python wasn't Guido's first attempt at a programming language, and Ruby wasn't Matz's first attempt at a language. It's hard to change fundamentals once you have already publicized a language and you have working code, and I think some of the fundamentals of Arc will definitely need to be changed. In particular, the distinctions between the different types of iterable objects - strings, arrays, lists - the inability to design your own objects that are also usable in the same ways as the built-in objects, these are pretty key aspects of the more recent programming languages. I could easily be wrong, but I still suspect the 100-year language quest needs a reboot.
Good luck, and I'll keep trying Arc 3 or whatever future stuff there is. I would love a successful language with real macro capability.
There wouldn't be any need to make a new language. I can change anything I want in this one. There's very little working code out there; that is in fact probably the main complaint about Arc; and one reason that's so is that I don't want it to be hard to change:
I'm not deeply committed to the current approach to iteration. But I don't want to switch to something more complicated till I can prove it's a net win. My standard of proof is whether the proposed language change will make the source of a real program shorter. So if you have an idea for a new iteration abstraction that would make some piece of code in news.arc shorter, please show me the source before and after. (You don't have to implement the new abstraction; just show me what code using it would look like.)
I think the best answer in the thread is the one by " cchooper", that starts with "Personally, I think the only thing". Search for it, it shows an interesting pov.
I personally feel that a language core should be the work of a single person.
Even 2 persons should not work together on a language core. The quantity of communication required if 2 persons work on a single language is so large, that hinders and messes up the development process.
The core set of axioms that form a language are almost fundamental as the laws of nature to that language. Just imagine theory of relativity being developed by several scientists together... almost impossible.
[+] [-] bluntSpeech|17 years ago|reply
If I were an arclanguage community member reading this and seeing pg's responses, I would not feel better.
The whole situation sounds like a big mess especially considering lisp's history of "community fragmentation and trivially incompatible implementations."
I sincerely hope things get better.
[+] [-] pg|17 years ago|reply
CL was in my opinion (and in the opinion a lot of Lisp hackers) a disaster in that respect. Before CL, Lisp had evolved rapidly by spawning new dialects. Once CL was established as the standard, this evolution practically stopped.
[+] [-] lacker|17 years ago|reply
Good luck, and I'll keep trying Arc 3 or whatever future stuff there is. I would love a successful language with real macro capability.
[+] [-] pg|17 years ago|reply
http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html
I'm not deeply committed to the current approach to iteration. But I don't want to switch to something more complicated till I can prove it's a net win. My standard of proof is whether the proposed language change will make the source of a real program shorter. So if you have an idea for a new iteration abstraction that would make some piece of code in news.arc shorter, please show me the source before and after. (You don't have to implement the new abstraction; just show me what code using it would look like.)
[+] [-] yters|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbokun|17 years ago|reply
But perhaps in tune with the entrepreneur ethos?
[+] [-] qwph|17 years ago|reply
To say nothing of impatience and hubris.
[+] [-] hhm|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vrs|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yters|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arjungmenon|17 years ago|reply
Even 2 persons should not work together on a language core. The quantity of communication required if 2 persons work on a single language is so large, that hinders and messes up the development process.
The core set of axioms that form a language are almost fundamental as the laws of nature to that language. Just imagine theory of relativity being developed by several scientists together... almost impossible.