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

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:55:40 -0800 (PST), usenet@kfischer.com wrote:

> What do you think will be the long term impact of Arc on CL?

It will fill up c.l.l with useless discussions for the next few weeks.

Edi.

--

European Common Lisp Meeting, Amsterdam, April 19/20, 2008

http://weitz.de/eclm2008/

Real email: (replace (subseq "spamtrap@agharta.de" 5) "edi")

In article
<24a39fc8-918b-4dd0-9314-1828f86e5251@i7g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,
usenet@kfischer.com wrote:

> http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html
>
> This is a big day for Lisp hackers anyway.

Is it? I can't see why. It is a preliminary implementation
of a small Lisp dialect on top of a Scheme implementation.

> 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?

Almost none.

On Jan 29, 10:55 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?

I liked this quote: "Which is why, incidentally, Arc only supports
Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has
some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. But it would
probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to interact
with it, and I don't want to spend even one day dealing with character
sets. Character sets are a black hole. I realize that supporting only
Ascii is uninternational to a point that's almost offensive, like
calling Beijing Peking, or Roma Rome (hmm, wait a minute). But the
kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn't like Arc
anyway."

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?

I am tempted, I need something to keep me from working on my Algebra
software.

Actually, I have been thinking along the same lines as PG: I need to
push something out the door to get direction from users on what to do
next otherwise I could write this thing for another year or ten.

> What do you think will be the long
> term impact of Arc on CL?

Fortran -> COBOL -> C -> C++ -> Java -> Python -> Ruby -> Arc -> CL.

kt

--
http://www.theoryyalgebra.com/

"In the morning, hear the Way;
in the evening, die content!"
-- Confucius

Ken Tilton wrote:
>
>
> 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?
>
>
> I am tempted, I need something to keep me from working on my Algebra
> software.
>
> Actually, I have been thinking along the same lines as PG: I need to
> push something out the door to get direction from users on what to do
> next otherwise I could write this thing for another year or ten.
>
>> What do you think will be the long
>> term impact of Arc on CL?
>
>
> Fortran -> COBOL -> C -> C++ -> Java -> Python -> Ruby -> Arc -> CL.

Confirmation, if needed:

"[This is a brief tutorial on Arc. It's intended for readers with
little programming experience and no Lisp experience. It is thus
also an introduction to Lisp.]" http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt

kt

--
http://www.theoryyalgebra.com/

"In the morning, hear the Way;
in the evening, die content!"
-- Confucius

On Jan 29, 2:55 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?

How wrong is it to regard it as a new Morris worm that infects
MzScheme installations with unhygienic macros and empty lists that
serve as false?

usenet@kfischer.com writes:

> 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?

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. :-)

Joost.

On 2008-01-30 00:40:06 +0000, Kaz Kylheku <kkylheku@gmail.com> said:

> How wrong is it to regard it as a new Morris worm that infects
> MzScheme installations with unhygienic macros and empty lists that
> serve as false?

:-) :-)

Den Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:55:40 -0800 skrev usenet:

> 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?

Negligible. Arc's got a couple of cute hacks that it can afford to have
being designed from scratch with no existing codebase, a lot of
artificial terseness where it doesn't belong, and very little of lasting
value. And it manages to make itself instantly obsolete, if in 2008,
after 7 years it doesn't even have Unicode support because PG can't be
bothered to figure out his Scheme's docs, 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.

Cheers,
Maciej