5 ms·

Arc: Where are we going?

69 points by nreece 18y ago

bluntSpeech 18y ago
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." I sincerely hope things get better.
- pg 18y ago
  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.
  - herdrick 18y ago
    Amen. Lisp history is like Chinese history. The 'warring states' period, though lamented as chaotic, was the most innovative time for both. Harmonious unity sounds good but yields stagnation. So three cheers for Arc and Clojure, and Estonia, the Czech Republic, the Liga Nord, the Bloc Québécois and the state of Jefferson.
  - davidw 18y ago
    I've thought about this some, and think it depends on how you define "health". What you describe sounds very healthy in terms of a good place to be for those wanting to hack on cool, new things, to push boundaries, to explore, and so on. However, I am less certain that it makes for a healthy community in terms of one where there are relatively fewer producers of the language, and many consumers, and those consumers want something that "just works" that they can depend on. In that sort of situation, you run into the problem where people get annoyed with the "which one!?" problem described here: http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2006/02/18/maximizers-satisficers-and-programming-languages http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2006/02/18/maximizers-sa... My gut feeling is that there's a 'right' balance that's hard to find. If you just want to explore and be creative and push the limits, that kind of fragmentation is probably good, or at least not harmful. If you want to create something that people, say, base their businesses on, I think that it is not as positive. People get nervous about picking the 'right' one; beginners are especially confused, because they may not even have acquired the knowledge to decide what is 'right'. Lots of hacking goes into implementations, rather than libraries, and libraries may not work on all implementations, further exacerbating the 'which one' problem, which now involves looking at which libs run where. Another part of the "problem" is that if you're aiming for "fun and experimentation", you are in a somewhat different (enviable?) position than most programming language creators: you've written about and popularized the language already, and are somewhat famous yourself, guaranteeing Arc a wide audience, something that is probably likely to attract more 'consumer' types than 'creators'. They're the ones who will be grumpy about not having something stable.
    - pg 18y ago
      "hack on cool, new things, to push boundaries, to explore, and so on" That sounds pretty good to me, actually. I don't see why aiming for "fun and experimentation" would put me in a different position from other language designers. It's not like anyone does this for a living. I bet most of them started out working on their language in the spirit of intellectual adventure, then gradually got dragged into being motivated more by duty and eminence, till eventually like poor Guido their time was all taken up thinking about character sets. That sounds to me like something one ought to resist. Doesn't it to you? Amusingly enough, you can see the pressure in action all over this thread, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=343663 http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=343663 I'm pretty good at resisting though ;)
      - deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
      - davidw 18y ago
        Then it becomes, as is so often the case, a question of proper marketing, and managing expectations. You seem to have acquired a group of users/interested onlookers expecting something they're not getting. Or at least a few loud ones:-) I'm actually fascinated by these 'social science' (i.e. not really a science) aspects of programming languages. If you think about it, programming languages are all about people, how they interact with computers, and how they interact with one another to solve complex problems.
      - lacker 18y ago
        I don't see why you are so dismissive of Unicode handling as it relates to programming language design. To deal with string encoding correctly, your programming language needs to transparently deal with different types of strings, or a single string that has two ways to iterate over it. That's an interesting design problem. In particular, you do not want everything in Arc to be an object. But the typical way other programming languages deal with Unicode nicely is to have different classes that implement a common string interface. So how can Arc approach the string encoding problem without making everything an object? I don't know, but I do think it's an important question.
lacker 18y ago
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.
- pg 18y ago
  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: http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html 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.)
  - damienkatz 18y ago
    > My standard of proof is whether the proposed language change will make the source of a real program shorter Short != Clear. Brevity is a false economy, I think you are pushing for the wrong goal.
    - pg 18y ago
yters 18y ago
This whole attitude of now, now, now, seems very against the hacker ethos. What happened to procrastination and laziness?
- qwph 18y ago
  What happened to procrastination and laziness? To say nothing of impatience and hubris.
- jimbokun 18y ago
  "This whole attitude of now, now, now, seems very against the hacker ethos." But perhaps in tune with the entrepreneur ethos?
  - yters 18y ago
    Yes, I think that is a good point.
hhm 18y ago
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.
- yters 18y ago
  I like that, the 100 year language is an idea, not an implementation.
- vrs 18y ago
  Link: http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=8493 http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=8493
arjungmenon 18y ago
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.

69 points by nreece 18y ago

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." I sincerely hope things get better.

pg 18y ago
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.
- herdrick 18y ago
  Amen. Lisp history is like Chinese history. The 'warring states' period, though lamented as chaotic, was the most innovative time for both. Harmonious unity sounds good but yields stagnation. So three cheers for Arc and Clojure, and Estonia, the Czech Republic, the Liga Nord, the Bloc Québécois and the state of Jefferson.
- davidw 18y ago
  I've thought about this some, and think it depends on how you define "health". What you describe sounds very healthy in terms of a good place to be for those wanting to hack on cool, new things, to push boundaries, to explore, and so on. However, I am less certain that it makes for a healthy community in terms of one where there are relatively fewer producers of the language, and many consumers, and those consumers want something that "just works" that they can depend on. In that sort of situation, you run into the problem where people get annoyed with the "which one!?" problem described here: http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2006/02/18/maximizers-satisficers-and-programming-languages http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2006/02/18/maximizers-sa... My gut feeling is that there's a 'right' balance that's hard to find. If you just want to explore and be creative and push the limits, that kind of fragmentation is probably good, or at least not harmful. If you want to create something that people, say, base their businesses on, I think that it is not as positive. People get nervous about picking the 'right' one; beginners are especially confused, because they may not even have acquired the knowledge to decide what is 'right'. Lots of hacking goes into implementations, rather than libraries, and libraries may not work on all implementations, further exacerbating the 'which one' problem, which now involves looking at which libs run where. Another part of the "problem" is that if you're aiming for "fun and experimentation", you are in a somewhat different (enviable?) position than most programming language creators: you've written about and popularized the language already, and are somewhat famous yourself, guaranteeing Arc a wide audience, something that is probably likely to attract more 'consumer' types than 'creators'. They're the ones who will be grumpy about not having something stable.
  - pg 18y ago
    "hack on cool, new things, to push boundaries, to explore, and so on" That sounds pretty good to me, actually. I don't see why aiming for "fun and experimentation" would put me in a different position from other language designers. It's not like anyone does this for a living. I bet most of them started out working on their language in the spirit of intellectual adventure, then gradually got dragged into being motivated more by duty and eminence, till eventually like poor Guido their time was all taken up thinking about character sets. That sounds to me like something one ought to resist. Doesn't it to you? Amusingly enough, you can see the pressure in action all over this thread, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=343663 http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=343663 I'm pretty good at resisting though ;)
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
    - davidw 18y ago
      Then it becomes, as is so often the case, a question of proper marketing, and managing expectations. You seem to have acquired a group of users/interested onlookers expecting something they're not getting. Or at least a few loud ones:-) I'm actually fascinated by these 'social science' (i.e. not really a science) aspects of programming languages. If you think about it, programming languages are all about people, how they interact with computers, and how they interact with one another to solve complex problems.
    - lacker 18y ago
      I don't see why you are so dismissive of Unicode handling as it relates to programming language design. To deal with string encoding correctly, your programming language needs to transparently deal with different types of strings, or a single string that has two ways to iterate over it. That's an interesting design problem. In particular, you do not want everything in Arc to be an object. But the typical way other programming languages deal with Unicode nicely is to have different classes that implement a common string interface. So how can Arc approach the string encoding problem without making everything an object? I don't know, but I do think it's an important question.

lacker 18y ago

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.

pg 18y ago
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: http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html 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.)
- damienkatz 18y ago
  > My standard of proof is whether the proposed language change will make the source of a real program shorter Short != Clear. Brevity is a false economy, I think you are pushing for the wrong goal.
  - pg 18y ago

yters 18y ago

This whole attitude of now, now, now, seems very against the hacker ethos. What happened to procrastination and laziness?

qwph 18y ago
What happened to procrastination and laziness? To say nothing of impatience and hubris.
jimbokun 18y ago
"This whole attitude of now, now, now, seems very against the hacker ethos." But perhaps in tune with the entrepreneur ethos?
- yters 18y ago
  Yes, I think that is a good point.

hhm 18y ago

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.

yters 18y ago
I like that, the 100 year language is an idea, not an implementation.
vrs 18y ago
Link: http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=8493 http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=8493

arjungmenon 18y ago

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.