9 ms·

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

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.

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.