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Arc is beautiful, but Paul Graham was wrong about one thing. For language adoption-- at least circa 2013 (which he couldn't have foreseen)-- libraries do matter

Arc is beautiful, but Paul Graham was wrong about one thing. For language adoption-- at least circa 2013 (which he couldn't have foreseen)-- libraries do matter. This is to Clojure's advantage and Arc's detriment. A typical IT boss is not going to let you spend 6 months writing libraries, so a lack of libraries is a problem. The people who pick languages in all but the most daring startups tend to see "lack of libraries" as more of a problem than it actually is. Paul Graham was building a web company in the mid-1990s, so rewriting a bunch of libraries was not an impediment. First, they had top-notch programmers who were willing to work with FFIs, write tools they were used to in other languages, and understand technology deeply enough to write good libraries. Second, the state-of-the-art for libraries in the 1990s was, if nothing else, less Big. Third, they didn't need to sell their language choice to a boss; they just needed to sell the product to the market and investors, neither of which cares what language you use as long as it works. Arc is prettier than Clojure but, in my experience, Clojure is more than attractive enough... and it has the familiar JVM libraries.

PaulHoule 14y ago
A big reason why PHP was as successful as it was is that it came with a fairly complete and correct standard library for writing webapps. This way you could spend zero time writing your own urlencode function (and screw up a corner case) or searching through maven to find functions to do very simple things and finding later other people on your team imported similar functions from four other projects.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  "with a fairly complete and correct library for writing webapps" Some of which were dangerous and unwieldy actually. Then proven dangerous and unwieldy. And then most of things that made idiomatic PHP were removed from the language or discouraged and nobody writes that way anymore.
  - graysnorf 14y ago
    Suggesting that, at least for language adoption, a standard library that is "good enough" is sufficient, and can be fixed later.
    - dllthomas 14y ago
      This probably depends on the environment (including alternatives) at the time.
  - agumonkey 14y ago
    It didn't matter, the reference frame was aligned with php for most things, it seems to me that it was more "valuable" to have bad glue between curl, mysql, foo, than have a good linguistic substrate and good stdlib.
peatmoss 14y ago
And of course Clojure addresses another issue raised in this article of regex as a first-class citizen. I'm pretty new to Clojure, but that has already given me a few "ah" moments.
emmett 14y ago
Where on earth did you get the idea PG thinks libraries don't matter? I don't think I've ever seen PG say anything like that. Here's where, in fact, he says the exact opposite: Of course the ultimate in brevity is to have the program already written for you, and merely to call it. And this brings us to what I think will be an increasingly important feature of programming languages: library functions. http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html In fact, read the whole section 6, on Libraries.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Great link. I remember him saying something to the effect of libraries not mattering in his decision to use Common Lisp for Viaweb, but that's not the same thing as him saying that they're unimportant for language adoption. So I guess my memory is inaccurate. Where there is disagreement is that most CTO's are afraid to adopt "weird" languages out of library FUD, which PG asserts doesn't matter. On that, I think PG is right.
qznc 14y ago
I wonder if the embedded-language angle of attack is more promising today. Lua and Javascript did not need bug libraries. They are embedded into larger programs and invoked useful functionality there instead. Nevertheless, in both communities people try to write standalone programs nowadays and standard libraries will emerge at some point.
- justincormack 14y ago
  Lua more so I think as it has easy C interfaces built in.

PaulHoule 14y ago

A big reason why PHP was as successful as it was is that it came with a fairly complete and correct standard library for writing webapps. This way you could spend zero time writing your own urlencode function (and screw up a corner case) or searching through maven to find functions to do very simple things and finding later other people on your team imported similar functions from four other projects.

guard-of-terra 14y ago
"with a fairly complete and correct library for writing webapps" Some of which were dangerous and unwieldy actually. Then proven dangerous and unwieldy. And then most of things that made idiomatic PHP were removed from the language or discouraged and nobody writes that way anymore.
- graysnorf 14y ago
  Suggesting that, at least for language adoption, a standard library that is "good enough" is sufficient, and can be fixed later.
  - dllthomas 14y ago
    This probably depends on the environment (including alternatives) at the time.
- agumonkey 14y ago
  It didn't matter, the reference frame was aligned with php for most things, it seems to me that it was more "valuable" to have bad glue between curl, mysql, foo, than have a good linguistic substrate and good stdlib.

peatmoss 14y ago

And of course Clojure addresses another issue raised in this article of regex as a first-class citizen. I'm pretty new to Clojure, but that has already given me a few "ah" moments.

emmett 14y ago

Where on earth did you get the idea PG thinks libraries don't matter? I don't think I've ever seen PG say anything like that. Here's where, in fact, he says the exact opposite: Of course the ultimate in brevity is to have the program already written for you, and merely to call it. And this brings us to what I think will be an increasingly important feature of programming languages: library functions. http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html In fact, read the whole section 6, on Libraries.

michaelochurch 14y ago
Great link. I remember him saying something to the effect of libraries not mattering in his decision to use Common Lisp for Viaweb, but that's not the same thing as him saying that they're unimportant for language adoption. So I guess my memory is inaccurate. Where there is disagreement is that most CTO's are afraid to adopt "weird" languages out of library FUD, which PG asserts doesn't matter. On that, I think PG is right.

qznc 14y ago

I wonder if the embedded-language angle of attack is more promising today. Lua and Javascript did not need bug libraries. They are embedded into larger programs and invoked useful functionality there instead. Nevertheless, in both communities people try to write standalone programs nowadays and standard libraries will emerge at some point.

justincormack 14y ago
Lua more so I think as it has easy C interfaces built in.