He did however say: "It's not for everyone. In fact, Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language. It doesn

He did however say: "It's not for everyone. In fact, Arc embodies just about every form of political incorrectness possible in a programming language. It doesn't have strong typing, or even type declarations; it uses overlays on hash tables instead of conventional objects; its macros are unhygienic; it doesn't distinguish between falsity and the empty list, or between form and content in web pages; it doesn't have modules or any predefined form of encapsulation except closures; it doesn't support any character sets except ascii. Such things may have their uses, but there's also a place for a language that skips them, just as there is a place in architecture for markers as well as laser printers." (http://arclanguage.com/ http://arclanguage.com/) I certainly interpreted this as ASCII-only (along with presentational markup) was an explicit design decision, and I don't think this is a far-fetched interpretation. Luckily PG has clarified (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111189 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111189) that this is not really what he meant, and now everyone is happy and has regained trust in Arc!