7 ms·
Ask PG: How is Arc coming along?
I noticed that 500 days ago you said that you'd be working on Arc again [1]. How's it going?
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493993
- zatkin 11y agoHe handed over the Hacker News leadership to a team of people a while ago[1], so that might be a reason for why he hasn't been working on it. [1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hacker-news http://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hack...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- malisper 11y agoPG's comment was made on the post you are referencing.
- maehwasu 11y agoClojure won.
- vosper 11y agoYou're getting downvoted, but I think there might be some truth to this.
- jeremiep 11y agoI'm fairly certain Arc influenced Clojure in some way. Especially the naming of functions such as fn, pr, prn and the likes.
- dkersten 11y agoI'm not sure, I've used 'fn' in toy programming language concepts before I ever heard of arc or clojure. I mean, its not impossible and I certainly don't know about the others, but its also not impossible that they were independently named. However, I do think its very likely that arc influenced Clojure, even if just a little.
- brudgers 11y agoI can't help but imagine a party, not entirely unlike the opening scene of Animal House except that everyone is older. Our protagonist enters and a hipster host quickly leads him away from the action and into a side room saying "Rich, Paul is working on a new dialect of lisp, too."
- davelnewton 11y agoI'm not really convinced Clojure is even one of the reasons, though. It seems like they have different goals and mindsets.
- melling 11y agoHe should probably rephrase. Clojure has won as an acceptable Lisp in business. Lisp'ers should probably get behind it to help to grow it even more. Once it grows, other Lisps will have an easier time.
- davelnewton 11y agoI think a lot of Lispers are; it got a great reception at Lisp50 from at least some of the oldbies in attendance.
- drcode 11y agoAs likely one of the few people outside of pg to use arc in production, I agree Clojure won- It has about 80% of the features that arc pioneered, and many additional features that leave arc in the dust. (Most of the remaining "good ideas" in arc are syntactic sugar which are just too controversial to see mainstream adoption.)
- dublinben 11y agoYou're definitely not the only person using Arc in production. Hubski is written in Arc and still under active development.
- drcode 11y agoIn my defense, I wrote "one of the few people" :-)
- jules 11y agoCould you list the features that Arc pioneered?
- wcummings 11y agoWhat features did arc "pioneer"?
- drcode 11y agoShoot, it's been too long for me to sort out the various features now, but you can read about the cooler parts of arc here: http://old.ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt http://old.ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt which won't look very exciting to any Clojure programmer nowadays. Probably its most useful innovation, even if it sounds mundane now (and I'm not 100% sure it was first on this- feel free to correct me) is that it was the first Lisp to realize that sequences and key-value associations are both equally important and should both have first-class status in the core language (with proper literal and shortcut accessor support) ... so like clojure, arc is more of a MLISP (Map and LISt Processor) However, the posted link doesn't have examples of the crazy syntactic sugar stuff pg did that I think was added in a later revision.
- ColinWright 11y agoClickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493993
- nabla9 11y agoWithout deadline there will never be need to compromise. You can keep thinking about it year after year and seek perfection that is The Hundred-Year Language. http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html
- mlitchard 11y agoPlans without deadlines are just dreams.
- pmelendez 11y agoSometimes dreams are long-term plans
- davelnewton 11y agoSometimes plans are short-term dreams.
- runjake 11y ago> Plans without *action* are just dreams. There. I fixed that for you.
- coldtea 11y agoNot really. If the action drags forever, they remain just dreams (like some great unfinished novel a guy writes for 50 years and gets to 60.000 pages).
- omouse 11y agoGood projects last for decades and outlive companies. See: LibreOffice ;)
- mhb 11y agoTo achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time. -Leonard Bernstein
- 11y ago
- dothis 11y agoPHP won.
- tylermauthe 11y agolol.
- dragonshed 11y agoSome context (say, for example, a brief description of Arc) might be helpful.
- ma2rten 11y agoLISP dialect invented by Paul Graham. This site is written in Arc. Afaik that is the only mayor application so far. http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/ http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html
- ForHackernews 11y ago> This site is written in Arc. Is that why nobody can ever add any useful new features to it?
- davelnewton 11y agoBURN
- crazypyro 11y agoMeh, even if it was true, I consider that in itself a feature.
- krapp 11y agoThat's what a closed-source fork of a forum written in a language almost no one cares about[0] will get you. [0] and a community which harbors a pathological fear of making Hacker News look and act like Reddit
- akkartik 11y agoThere's also more up-to-date documentation/support by the community: http://arclanguage.github.io http://arclanguage.github.io
- 1arity 11y agoPerhaps it is already complete. Inspiration: A manager went to the Master Programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the Master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?" "It will take one year," said the Master promptly. "But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?" The Master Programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years." "And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?" The Master Programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be completed," he said.