Paul Graham's Arc is released today... what is the long term impact? - lisp

> CL will be CL. Arc may be able to carve out a niche and it may even be
> able to break open the niche wide enough to get some serious mind
> share. I don't know. I'm going to play with it just because I think fn
> is much easier to type than lambda, and see what happens. :-)

heh. i stopped scrolling through the intro when i saw that print is
abbreviated to prn in a fresh language that is supposed to clean
things up... (this is an editor issue, not a language issue. why not
use # instead of + when it's easier to type... ?)

- attila

usenet@kfischer.com wrote:
> http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html
>
> This is a big day for Lisp hackers anyway. Has anyone here had a
> chance to play around with Arc yet? What do you think will be the long
> term impact of Arc on CL?

Just another person who tries to tell people what is important about
Lisp and what isn't, and removes the stuff from his own dialect that he
doesn't deem important. It's sad, because people will miss quite a few
things, without being aware of it (but it's their own fault).

Pascal

--
1st European Lisp Symposium (ELS'08)
http://prog.vub.ac.be/~pcostanza/els08/

My website: http://p-cos.net
Common Lisp Document Repository: http://cdr.eurolisp.org
Closer to MOP & ContextL: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/

Ken Tilton <kentilton@gmail.com> wrote:
+---------------
| Maciej Katafiasz wrote:
| > ...it's hard to comment on without mocking gestures. It seems
| > to me that Arc will fullfill its promise of a 100 years language
| > the same way Duke Nukem delivers the "forever" bit.
|
| Come on people, it's Lisp with a new name and a BDFL, everything
| everyone has told us we need. So Arc will make a big splash and a rising
| tide of FPL users lifts all FPLs. Arc has parentheses/prefix so that
| issue goes away for those who try Arc at which point they realize, hell,
| CL is compiled and mature aka Ready For Prime Time.
|
| Or Arc does so well I switch to it. I can't lose.
+---------------

Something for us to waste all our precious open-source spare time[1]
on: retarget Arc from MzScheme to your favorite CL. ;-}


-Rob

[1] "All your round tuit are belong to Arc!"

-----
Rob Warnock <rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607

Den Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:57:12 -0500 skrev Ken Tilton:

> Or Arc does so well I switch to it. I can't lose.

But that's been already established. As you're The Application Programmer
Of C.l.lâ„¢, it's a given: either you will get distracted from your real
work by X (win), or X will fail to distract you and you will spend time
doing your real work (also win).

But we know that, and personally I feel it's a bit unfair to rub it in
for all those of us who aren't doing real work .

*sob, sniff*,
Maciej

På Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:55:40 +0100, skrev <usenet@kfischer.com>:

> http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html
>
> This is a big day for Lisp hackers anyway. Has anyone here had a
> chance to play around with Arc yet? What do you think will be the long
> term impact of Arc on CL?

Well I took a look at it. I found it kinda cute.
Personally I like the terseness. CL has way to many long winded names.
(This is also the thing I didn't like in ADA.)
Also tossing out a bunch of parenthesises seems to make the code easier to
read.
It is a early pre-release and thus lacks many things needed for a serious
language.
Things like libraries, a module/package mechanism, support for building
projects, Unicode support..
Without this the performance isn't much of a issue either..
A 100 years from now when he has finally finished we will see.
(Admittedly to me it seems not so much like the language that lasted 100
years as the language DEVELOPEMENT that lasted 100 years.)

It clearly has a way to go, but generally I like it. Minimalistic,
coherent, powerful.
Writing a blog implementation in 107 lines is impressive.
I hate the '=' for assignment and 'is' for comparison.

I don't see it replacing, or even competing with, CL anytime soon though.


--------------
John Thingstad

Ken Tilton wrote:
> Come on people, it's Lisp with a new name and a BDFL, everything
> everyone has told us we need. So Arc will make a big splash and a rising
> tide of FPL users lifts all FPLs.

Maybe Paul Graham will actually create a brilliant collection of open
source libraries and a great package management, as he claims he intends.

Then we can hack a ten-liner :cl-arc-compat and all our library trouble
goes away.

Peter

"John Thingstad" <jpthing@online.no> writes:
>Writing a blog implementation in 107 lines is impressive.

This already seems to be a commonplace:

»Then there's always that one person who says "I saw a
demo of [insert technology here] where they built a blog
in 50 lines of code."«

http://www.joereger.com/logmain48.log

On Jan 29, 11:55 pm, use...@kfischer.com wrote:
> http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html
>
> This is a big day for Lisp hackers anyway. Has anyone here had a
> chance to play around with Arc yet? What do you think will be the long
> term impact of Arc on CL?

Arc is probably a good lisp. Let us reunite the best features of
existant lisps (emacs lisp, scheme, arc...) and make a perfect one.
We could call it Common Lisp.

>       »Then there's always that one person who says "I saw a
>       demo of [insert technology here] where they built a blog
>       in 50 lines of code."«
>

I can make a blog using ascii text and Apache with zero lines of code.