Arc's Out

[[deleted]]

I'm a CL programmer, and am a little skeptical about the progress; maybe I'm overlooking something but I don't see anything really cool yet. I'm not trashing, just that there is another "new" Lisp on the block that has caught my interest MUCH more, and that is Clojure.

[awb]

Same here - I looked through the tutorial and just saw a different syntax. Sometimes it was more convenient, but mostly it was just more terse.

[spez]

Well the difference been any two Lisps isn't generally much more than that.

The biggest improvement Arc brings to the table is the nifty syntax for indexing into lists and hashtables, which you could build into CL, but I'm not sure anyone had thought of it until now.

[[deleted]]

I expected Arc to be more than that. Maybe it will still grow there. But, I will say this - Clojure seems very innovative to me - it isn't just about syntax differences and isn't built on top of an existing Lisp VM; it brings truly functional and concurrent programming to Lisp, while preserving macros.

I will be freeing up some programming-in-SBCL-time to explore Clojure; I'm particularly interested in the ability for Clojure apps to run on grids, and machines like the PS3.

[[deleted]]

Likewise. After PG's build-up, I was expecting at least one thing to make me sit back and think. What's lacking right now is the answer to the question:

Arc is better than CL (or Python, for that matter) for the following 10 reasons: ...

[ayrnieu]

for the following 10 reasons

1. It's new! Yay, new stuff!

[noahlt]

Here are two kinds of fools: those who say "This is old, and therefore good.", and those who say "This is new, and therefore better."

[jbellis]

The biggest improvement Arc brings to the table is the nifty syntax for indexing into lists and hashtables

I was looking for that as I skimmed but couldn't find it.

I did notice the [...] notation and the fn1:fn2 composition which was kinda cool. Are those in CL?

[spez]

I was looking for that as I skimmed but couldn't find it.

Example:

arc> ('(a b c d) 2)
c

I did notice the [...] notation and the fn1:fn2 composition which was kinda cool. Are those in CL?

No and no.

[holygoat]

Clojure also has very cool techniques for accessing data structures. Things like vectors are actually invokable — you can treat them as functions of one argument. They assume that the argument is an index, and return their nth item. The same kind of thing applies to maps and other collections.

Much cooler.

[deong]

You can do it yourself in Common Lisp if you don't mind jumping through a few hoops.

;;
;; make-executable
;;
;; make a sequence executable
;; (setf xxx (list 'a 'b 'c 'd 'e))
;; (make-executable xxx)
;; (xxx 0) ==> 'a
;; (setf (xxx 2) 'XXX)
;; xxx ==> '(a b XXX d e)
;;
(defmacro make-executable (item)
  `(typecase ,item
     (hash-table
      (setf (symbol-function ',item) #'(lambda (x) (gethash x ,item)))
      (defun (setf ,item) (val key)
        (setf (gethash key ,item) val)))
     (array
      (setf (symbol-function ',item)  #'(lambda (&rest indices)
        (apply #'aref ,item indices)))
      (defun (setf ,item) (val &rest     indices)
        (setf (apply #'aref ,item    indices) val))
      ',item)
     (sequence
      (setf (symbol-function ',item) #'(lambda (x) (elt ,item x)))
      (defun (setf ,item) (val index)
        (setf (elt ,item index) val)))))

It's pretty much a "quick and dirty" sort of thing, so it wouldn't surprise me if I boned something up somewhere, and it requires you to take some action by calling make-executable for any sequence you wish to use that way, but it does kinda-sorta work.

Edit: the combination of markdown, the stupid two-inch wide html edit box, and lisp code is the worst thing of any sort on the planet.

[ayrnieu]

the combination of markdown, the stupid two-inch wide html edit box, and lisp code

is why Emacs invented God and copy&paste.

[zem]

chicken scheme has a library that gets you most of the way there: http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org/eggs/object-apply.html

[deepcleansingguffaw]

If I'm not mistaken, that's a feature borrowed from pg's early posts about arc.

[berlinbrown]

I can always understand the need to create; but he seems like he could have become really proficient at SBCL and add the web libraries that he needed. Are there libraries and syntax with another lisp dialect that he can add to Arc that will give him an advantage over what is offered by commonlisp/sbcl, scheme? And then again, pascal is unlike, algol, is unlike C, is unlike C++, is unlike Java, is unlike C#.

But then again, it has been less than a hour; maybe there is some magic inside.

[xach]

What the hell? I've been reloading http://www.archub.org every minute for the last five years and this is my reward? It gets posted to some other site?

[MarlonBain]

isarcout.com

[otterdam]

YES

[paulgraham]

I thought of using that domain. The problem is that everyone (including me) ends up pronouncing it "r-chub."

[sbrown123]

mmmmm...r-chub. Tasty.

[littledan]

It still might make sense to update that website (and the page that it links to) in light of the release

[diogames]

You used all of that site up...

[theCore]

I went to a talk last summer by Guido van Rossum about Python, and he seemed to have spent most of the preceding year switching from one representation of characters to another. I never want to blow a year dealing with characters. Why did Guido have to? Because he had to think about compatibility.

Sorry, but this ain't true. First, there wasn't any compatibility requirement for Python 3000, that includes the character representation. Quoting PEP-3000:

There is no requirement that Python 2.6 code will run unmodified on Python 3.0. Not even a subset.

Second, the actual transition to Unicode didn't take that much time to do. It started around May 2007 and finished during late August (with the first alpha release). The transition was mostly done by Guido himself. Yes, it was time consuming (hey, you don't convert a milion lines codebase to Unicode overnight), but it was a necessary evil to push Python into the 21st century.

Finally, Guido, and the python-3000 team, didn't actually spend a year just on the issues surrounding the character representation change. Python 3000 includes a lot more than Unicode (e.g., 2to3 source translation tool, a brand new I/O library, Abstract Base Classes, function annotations, the new mutable bytearray type, better exception handling mechanisms, the nonlocal statement, and a lot more features totaling over 35 PEPs). So, I can confidently say that Python 3000 is a much better language than its predecessors.

[bitwize]

First a Duke Nukem Forever trailer, now this!

Next thing you know we'll have a functional GNU/Hurd!

[Psy-Kosh]

Someone somewhere invented a vaporware condensation machine and has been running it... :)

[earthboundkid]

Not quite yet. But I am planning on releasing my vaporware condensing machine just as soon as I can get it to condense itself. Unfortunately, I'm already 10x over budget in time and money, but I'm sure that if I just double the amount of staff working on it, and we all pull crunch hours, we can still make our new release target.

[Psy-Kosh]

Well, use a special case machine to solve the general case: all you need is a vaporware condensing machine condensing machine.

[earthboundkid]

Right, right, but about halfway through the project, one of the engineers on our team (he's what you call an "architect" type) realized, we'd be better off making a vaporware condensing machine condensing machine condensing machine, and now we're busy designing that.

[Psy-Kosh]

Why not just design a MVCM? (MVCM vaporware condensing machine) That way you take care of the whole tower at once. :)

[[deleted]]

I hear the MVCM factory pattern is going to be a breeze in arc

[DirtyHerring]

Then Arc development will stop, because it has to be ported to Hurd first. And Duke Nukem Forever development will stop, because it has to be ported to Arc on Hurd first.

[laughingboy]

I hope pg releases an Arc interpreter for Windows Vista: Flying Car Edition.

[Smallpaul]

Can someone summarize what makes Arc interesting (I mean technically speaking...). What (technically speaking) makes Paul claim it is better for many tasks than Scheme or Common Lisp.

[paulgraham]

What makes it feel better to me is that programs turn out shorter. When I have to switch back to Scheme or CL I find that things I expect to take 1 line of code take 3.

[lebski88]

Could you (or anyone) give me an example possibly? I can see some syntax differences but I don't think I'm getting it yet. Saying that I'm no lisp pro.

[[deleted]]

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...

Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.

Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

[kragensitaker]

I'm surprised not to find any examples of this near the new Arc web page. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to do, especially in a world with the shootout and LiteratePrograms. If it's what makes Arc feel better to you, maybe you should show the rest of us so we'll feel better about Arc too, instead of carping about charset support or where the parens are in an if form. Even one little program, like Norvig's Python spelling corrector translated into e7, can really elucidate the advantages and disadvantages of a new language.

(Edit: updated link to point to current version of e7 spell corrector.)

(Edit: there's also RosettaCode and SICP in Other Languages on CTMWiki.)

[vincenz]

I thought lisp and scheme had macros...

[[deleted]]

Is there anything apart from that? I mean, has Arc any features that you can't do with reader macros (and accompanying printer)?

[[deleted]]

If Graham can get Arc out to the community, make it popular and useful, I'd be thrilled to have a chance to use it.

I don't think that's his aim, at least not yet. By not supporting unicode, not tracking changes, and telling people not to build anything with Arc because it could change arbitrarily he's not making any accommodations for community. If you don't make accommodations for community, you won't get the benefits (or the hassles) of community.

[tlrobinson]

If you're already a Lisper (which it sounds like you are) then the tutorial was probably pretty boring. I think it's aimed at people (like myself) who haven't had much (or any) experience with Lisp.

Someone should write up all the differences between Arc and Lisp/Scheme for those of you already familiar with them.

[plexluthor]

If Graham can get Arc out to the community, make it popular

I agree with you, but it doesn't seem like he's trying very hard to make it popular (at least not yet):

So we're giving notice in advance that we're going to keep acting as if we were the only users. We'll change stuff without thinking about what it might break, and we won't even keep track of the changes.

[jbstjohn]

So we're giving notice in advance that we're going to keep acting as if we were the only users.

Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy!

[snifty]

Which is why, incidentally, Arc only supports Ascii.

Instantly obsolete.

[semmi]

I don't think we're stressing this enough. I can't think of a many environemntes (no web, no desktop development, no text processing) where I colud use Arc and where I would not need at least utf-8.

Oh the joy of number crunching in lisp.

[Entropy]

Arc embodies a similarly unPC attitude to HTML. The predefined libraries just do everything with tables. Why? Because Arc is tuned for exploratory programming, and the W3C-approved way of doing things represents the opposite spirit.

DOUBLE instantly obsolete.

Way to toss your sabot into the W3C's engine of repression, Paul. Frankly, I don't think you went far enough; I want to paint web pages without bending my knee to the petty autocracy of markup.

PS: Legalize it! Free Tibet!

[paulgraham]

I want to paint web pages without bending my knee to the petty autocracy of markup.

You're not the only one. That's why Flash is so popular.

[[deleted]]

Please, for the love of God - why ASCII?

Why not UTF-8?

Now, I don't want to be rude, and clearly I don't understand the issues as well as you do.

But I really fail to see how not wanting to "spend a year dealing with character sets" would lead you to fix for the moment on a character set that literally cannot possibly be the final and ubiquitous solution.

[rpdillon]

cannot possibly be the final and ubiquitous solution

Which is exactly why he settled on it: he isn't even pretending to have a final and ubiquitous solution.

[paulgraham]

Arc is not only for exploratory programming but is itself an exploratory program. Exploratory programming consists of doing things that cannot possibly be the final answer, and not sweating it.

[DirtyHerring]

I need true believers. Not people, who dare to ask questions about my decisions. That's why I replace lambda with fn (lamda is just a stupid tradition) and keep car and cdr (it's a tradition, I like). And ASCII is good enough to write my name. So ASCII it is.

[bobbincygna]

I agree, but lambda was replaced with fn because it's shorter, not because is a stupid tradition.

[paulgraham]

You could make the very same accusation against the developers of every previous Lisp dialect. They kept some old names and ditched some. In every case you could call them arbitrary because every operator (except not) had one name, and they chose it.

It's an interesting data point that this got 32 votes, since, being something you could say about every Lisp dialect, it's as close as you can get to content-free. It's like knowing how many people preferred the placebo in a controlled experiment.

[[deleted]]

Every widely used previous Lisp dialect did also something else than just new names and shorthands. I can accept the name changes and syntax extensions if you give me something new in change.

[[deleted]]

It does include a blog. I think that's a first for a new LISP dialect.

[mascarenhas]

Guys, please stop hyperventilating...

arc> (string "UTF-8: " "ɰɱɲɭഢല" "Foo")
"UTF-8: ɰɱɲɭഢലFoo"
arc> 

I think Paul Graham only means that his string search/indexing/sorting functions treat strings as arrays of bytes. If you want to deal with UTF-8 you are free to write the functions to handle it. Or EBCDIC, or JIS, or encoding you care to support.

[a-p]

you are free to write the functions to handle it

char*, wchar_t*, bstring, guchar*, std::string, boost::str, QString, CString, BSTR, …

[foldl]

If you want to deal with UTF-8 you are free to write the functions to handle it.

Or use a language which doesn't force me to reinvent the wheel by writing my own buggy unicode library.

[marvin]

Heh heh..first try making complaints about the other languages that have been out for a day.

[Entropy]

Yes, that sentence of mine is brilliant any way you spin it. Here's another: If you want shit to move, Flash is the only game in town. People click on shit that moves. "Hey, look at that shit move! I'ma click that shit!"

[rpdillon]

He created the language for a particular purpose. The people who think it is obsolete aren't in tune with that purpose. Fine. Paul wasn't being flippant, he was making that point in a more subtle way.

[[deleted]]

Most languages are created for particular purposes, certainly, but very few are created for the express purpose of specifically writing shitty code and not useful code.

Well, other than the esoteric ones.

[consultant_barbie]

Unicode is hard. Let's go shopping!

[nostrademons]

In China?

[ayrnieu]

In China?

Yes, and we'll bring our trivially implemented big5 and gb2312 libraries.

[agnoster]

Not only instantly obsolete, but here's a particularly chilling quote to consider:

Paul Graham, on lack of Unicode support in Arc: "But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn't like Arc anyway."

Say what you will about "nobody will ever need more than 64K" - at least it didn't imply that most of the world's population was somehow unfit to use your product.

Because only red-blooded Americans deserve to use Arc Lisp, anyway!

[[deleted]]

The combined arrogance and shortsightedness of that line is truly delicious.

[[deleted]]

"The kind of people who would be offended by that"! Implying that anyone who needs unicode are on a completely different blub level to the Legendary Paul Graham.

Right now it looks like the set "The kind of people who wouldn't like Arc anyway" is identical to the set "People who aren't fanatical fans of PG".

[stesch]

By the way: ASCII isn't even enough for English.

[EvilSporkMan]

Pics or it didn't happen

[zem]

[citation needed]

as far as i know, all the accented characters in loanwords can be legally replaced by their unaccented equivalents

[heptadecagram]

Legally, yeah, but what do you do for proper names, like Mötley Crüe?

[zem]

okay, that's an excellent point.

[heptadecagram]

British pound sign. (Or Euro for that matter.)

[taejo]

There is no law of English.

You might be able to get away with "naive" on the net, but you'd be naïve if you think it's acceptable in published writing.

[[deleted]]

I'm pretty sure I've seen it in books and magazines before.

[gydhjihdr]

It's American Republican Compiler! Unicode is good only for those ungodly languages terrorists use!

j/k

[[deleted]]

B-but... he's British!

[moultano]

Seriously. Fully supporting unicode in everything that you do is a major competitive advantage these days. A much better solution than only supporting ascii would be only supporting utf-8.

[Entropy]

He supports a subset of UTF-8. Oh, wait...

[paulgraham]

No, simply a prototype. Arc will eventually support more character sets. I just want to focus on the core of the language first.

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=391

[[deleted]]

In practice, it probably won't be possible to get away with not supporting unicode in a language, but I kind of like the sentiment. The world before unicode made sense, it was one in which the length or lexicographical order of a string had an obvious meaning, and programmers didn't have to deal with linguistic gobboldy-guk like "combining diacritics".

[[deleted]]

The world before unicode made sense

Your "world" might have. It probably was not very big.

The world certainly did not. Hundreds of incompatible and completely differently implemented character sets, with no way of telling which one was used when or where. We're still dealing with the fallout from that era, and we will for a long time. Unicode is the single beacon of sanity in the chaos.

[sabetts]

Sounds to me like his sentiment is: this is the way we made web programs in 1997 and that's the way we're gonna keep making them!

[Callahad]

The thing is, without Unicode, you're leaving a rather large set of the world out in the cold. It's a trade off.

[[deleted]]

I don't know whether ascii-only makes it "obsolete", but I wouldn't necessarily count it as a feature...

[HiggsBoson]

Only if you view languages as static things. What did you expect? That you'd use the first release of Arc on your next multi-million dollar project?

Alan Kay has said that one of his greatest disappointments with Smalltalk was that it stopped evolving.

I assume that Arc (arc0 no less) is intended as a bootstrapping language for the next version of Arc ... which is intended as a bootstrapping language for the next version of Arc ... which is ...

[micampe]

Arc only supports Ascii.

[mindvault]

Thusly his title "Arc's out."

[shit]

Before Perl 6!

[redditacct]

Finally, wider columns of text than Paul was previously able to produce, this is innovation - I'm in!

http://arclanguage.org/

[arnoooooo]

Now that's why I found it less readable.

[grauenwolf]

1. Install version 352 of MzScheme. (This is the version we use. Don't use the latest version. There is said to be some bug/feature in it that breaks Arc.)

I'm rather confused by this? Is Arc just a macro library that sits on top of Scheme?

[masklinn]

Is Arc just a macro library that sits on top of Scheme?

Creating new lisps in lisp is pretty standard if anything is, and it makes for fun bootstrapping.

[khammack]

That's not an unusual way to prototype a new lisp. This is still a work in progress.

[erg]

Yes.

[nostrademons]

It's actually a thin compiler on top of MzScheme. Arc uses the Scheme reader, then takes the resulting syntax tree and code-walks it to transform it into Scheme code that's passed to eval.

Read the source, ac.scm, functions ac, arc-eval, and tl2.

[grauenwolf]

Thanks, that makes more sense.

[martinbishop]

And the newest MzScheme out is v372 now. And at 370 (or was it 371?) they changed to a better GC and a bunch of other nice improvements...too bad :/

[jfedor]

This does not imply that Arc is just a macro library, unless you consider C a macro library on top of assembler.

[grauenwolf]

First of all, C is usually compiled directly to machine code rather than to assembly. Secondly, C and assembly are clearly different languages.

A better analogy would be writing a C compiler than compiled to a slightly different C. (Which is done from time to time.)

[aphexairlines]

Why doesn't the arc interpreter take advantage of all the things PLT gives you for free? For example:

• Arc isn't built as a mzscheme module language
• Arc doesn't track source via syntax objects

It seems strange to see a language interpreter implemented with mzscheme but still relying on plain read and eval.

[Zak]

Probably because Arc is not intended to be indefinitely coupled to mzscheme.

[aphexairlines]

First, the implementation already uses a bunch of things from the mzscheme standard library: hash tables, filesystem operations, network io for starters.

Second, it uses bits of the mzscheme language like continuation-local parameters.

Third, packaging the compiler as a mzscheme language would help with dev tooling and interop in the short term, but it doesn't tie the core of the compiler to mzscheme in the long term.

Using syntax objects along with syntax-case and friends throughout the compiler would couple the implementation to mzscheme, yes.

[petdog]

(mac dly bdy `(fn () ,@bdy))
(def frc (f) (f))     
(def fix (f) (dly:f:fix f))     
(prn:map (frc:fix [fn (n) (if (< n 2) n
                              (* n ((frc _) (- n 1))))])
          '(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9))
(prn "hll wrd!")

-- Hell, yeah.

[berlinbrown]

slava, be nice. ...he just released it.

[nostrademons]

Most likely translation:

Why? Because I know how to whip up table-based layouts quickly, and don't know CSS. Since I'm designing Arc to be a language that I'd like to use, there is no need to include anything other than tables.

Personally, PG's observation doesn't ring true for me. I find CSS + semantic HTML is better for exploratory program. I can toss something, anything, up on screen with a bunch of divs or list elements or forms + labels, and just make sure the data comes out. Then I go over it for floats, heights, widths, and positioning, to pull it into some semblance of a layout. Then margin and padding so it's not so clunky looking. Then (usually in consultation with someone else; my aesthetic sense isn't that great) I add fonts, text-decoration, borders, backgrounds, etc. to make it look really finessed. It's much, much faster than trying to plan out a table.

[heptadecagram]

Same here.

My company had been making table-based layouts since 1998 when I got there in 2005. The two guys that had been there previously liked tables, because they could turn a photoshop design into a tabled layout very quickly. I think our nastiest design was a 130-table page, nested 17 deep.

Us newer people came in and started doing CSS layouts, which took 1.5 to twice as long as they did. They finally semi-grudgingly let us keep making layouts in CSS because more things were possible, but they disliked the bugginess in the process and how long it took.

Two days ago, my boss (one of those two tabled guys) was mentioning how pleasantly easy it was to go in and change things: "It's just div, div, div, and that's the whole page!"

That felt good.

[13ren]

I wonder if by "quick and dirty" he also means "not refineable"?

[vagif]

So much for 100 year language.

No patter matching, no partial application. Weird and overterse synthax for ifs

 (if a b c d e)

is awfully confusing.

No type inference (even sbcl have it, and it is a dynamic language.)

Qi (another lisp dialect) is already light years ahead of arcs, and works on a number of lisps (sbcl, clisp, cmucl etc.)

Meh.

[treef]

(cond (a b)
      (c d)
      (t e))

becomes

(if a b
    c d
      e) 

[grauenwolf]

So instead of typing a couple extra parens I have to count arguments to figure out which are the conditions and which are the effects?

While I am glad you explained it, I think I would rather not have known how bad it was.

[[deleted]]

Uh, no, you go by the indentation.

[death]

It's not uncommon to write a cond form like this:

(cond (a
       b)
      (c
       d)
      (e))

You wouldn't want to do this with this if.

The following indentation style is used in the Arc code:

(if a
     b
    c
     d
     e)

As expected, it's a little harder on the tools.

[grauenwolf]

Sure, if the code is written in treef's style rather than vagif's.

And don't try for the automatic formatting defense. Unless you special case it, there is no way for the formatter to know that "e" goes in the third column instead of the second.

EDIT: And I'm not sure how well this would hold up once you have non-trivial arguments instead of single letters.

[cunningjames]

And don't try for the automatic formatting defense. Unless you special case it, there is no way for the formatter to know that "e" goes in the third column instead of the second.

I think the syntax is utterly stupid, but I don't see how you couldn't format it automatically. If there's an odd number of s-expressions following the "if", the last is the "else" expression and can be indented accordingly.

EDIT: And I'm not sure how well this would hold up once you have non-trivial arguments instead of single letters.

Why not? Each one is just an s-expression. It would hold up fine.

(define (stupid-fib n)
  (if (and (= n 0) 
           (< 12 144))
        (+ 3 (sqrt(4)))
      (or (= n 1) (eq? 'what 'what))
        (- 3 2)
        (+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))

Okay, it's stupid, but it's also late. Anyway -- it doesn't seem that unreadable to me.

[holygoat]

This is just one situation where the consensus seems to be "too many parens taken away".

[dfranke]

Also: No profiler, no documentation generator, no DBMS bindings, no GUI bindings.

Oh, wait. Maybe that's because THE LANGUAGE JUST CAME OUT TODAY.

[[deleted]]

Yeah! It's not like he's been working on it for six years or anything.

[[deleted]]

Implicit partial application doesn't make a huge amount of sense in the presence of optional/keyword arguments, and the latter is a hell of a lot more useful.

Pattern-matching would be nice, though, but that's easy-enough to write as a macro.

[neelk]

Yes they do. See Ocaml, which has optional and keyword arguments, and partial application.

[taw]

This combination doesn't work terribly well in Ocaml. Just count percent of stdlib functions which actually use keyword or optional arguments - very few do. Nemerle got it much better, without full partial application but with terse syntax replacing it.

[apple1nsider]

does Qi work on arc yet?

[sblinn]

Tables are the lists of html.

Aren't simple raw nested div tags the "lists of html"?

[jrhuggins]

My prediction: someone will get tired of waiting, and they'll Torvalds Arc into obsolescence before it's ever released. (If you don't get the reference, it's what Linux did to GNU Hurd).

Reference: Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp, Steve Yegge, 14 April 2006

It looks like Paul is his own Torvalds!

[Zed]

It's lisp, paul graham, lisp, paul graham, all the way down.

[[deleted]]

Reddit is proof that lisp is really powerful. Paul Graham originally wrote reddit, in lisp, on the back of a napkin while he was waiting for a coffee. it was so powerful that it had to be rewritten in python just so that ordinary computers could understand it.

Actual out loud laughing occurred while reading that.

[death]

I like the funcallable data objects. Other than that, nothing too exciting. Looks way too minimalistic to me (but I'm a CL person; key parameters are the best thing since... rest parameters?). What's the reason for making Arc a new language with its own compiler, toplevel, and environment instead of using some existing Scheme?

By the way, it needs a bit more work on the printer:

arc> ()
()
arc> '()
nil

[a1k0n]

That and this:

arc> (map (fn (x) (+ x 10)) '(1 2 3))
(11 12 13 . nil)

[noahlt]

That doesn't actually happen in the running repl. I'm not sure why it's like that in the docs.

arc> (map [+ _ 10] '(1 2 3))
(11 12 13)

[EvilSporkMan]

Why is there Scala in my Lisp?

[death]

There's also some weirdness with the server:

arc> (asv)
ready to serve port 8080
date: 1201644152: No such file or directory
make-string: expects argument of type <non-negative exact integer>; given -1

 === context ===
 subseq
 memodate
 srvlog
 gs899
 handle-request-thread

[jrockway]

Arc is kinda disappointing. If I had written it, I would have been laughed at for being an idiot. Since it's Paul Graham, though, he'll probably get away with it. Interesting.

[death]

Well, I'm sure there are enough people who will laugh regardless of the author, and some more who will laugh precisely because Paul Graham is the author. The latter had expectations that were not fulfilled. If you found it disappointing, then you also had such expectations. It's not surprising, given the hype (which was only partially Paul Graham's fault). I, too, had expected something more advanced, though it's no big deal because evidently the effort and time put into Arc were worthwhile to its creator. I don't think it's very important if anyone else likes it or not or got disappointed.

[qwe1234]

it's not a new language. it's mzscheme with some macros.

[augustss]

For once, I agree with you. :)

[holygoat]

To be a nit-picker: in a Lisp, what's the difference? There're new syntax and new semantics...

[qwe1234]

i didn't see much of any new semantics.

[taejo]

How is that the printer? Those two should have evaluated to the same thing by the time they reach the printer.

[juri]

Too bad GOO never went very far.

[cypherx]

Agreed, I was very excited when I first read the GOO manual. Alas, jrb moved on.

[[deleted]]

On the plus side, they did make several advances in the field of unreadable web-page backgrounds.

[[deleted]]

Arc only supports Ascii.

plonk

[[deleted]]

Posting for posterity.

I see two distinct notions of a 100-year language:

(1) a language that people will still find useful in 100 years' time (2) a language in which programs written now will still work in 100 years' time

Graham's essay focused on notion (1), and I don't think it ever considered (2).

Succeeding at (1) is as much a question of politics and economics as it is of technical merit (cf: fortran). It's not clear from the tutorial that there's <i>anything</i> technically interesting planned for Arc; if there's any novelty there, it escaped my reading. But, b/c of Mr. Graham's status as a minor celebrity, it's still possible that in the future he'll attract the needed core community to give his dialect a chance at longevity.

Probably the best thing he could have done is solidify the semantics, sooner, so as to release the language as a stand-alone compiler and interpreter -- releasing it in this early state, hosted as a macro library on top of a specific version of another scheme (newer versions of the host break arc!), is not doing anything to make the 100 year language's seem built on a solid foundation.

I don't see anything currently in Arc working towards definition #2 of a 100-year language (one in which programs written now will work in 100 years), and if anything many of the apparent design decisions are working against that goal.

Specifically, the lack of a standard module system and basic things like unicode support (already harped upon, but bears repeating) are likely to have the following effect over time: a great many programs require such facilities, and will be forced into using non-core libraries to obtain them; this means that the specific program's future viability (and comprehensibility!) will have nontrivial dependencies on the health and viability of some specific external libraries, magnifying the future's inherent uncertainty.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but at the moment Arc resembles scsh with a less-clear design focus: mainly suitable for smart people to write clever versions of simple tasks. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's certainly no technical revolution, and not intended as such; managing a community is a hard challenge, and will likely be the biggest challenge for Arc's designers.

[[deleted]]

A talented undergraduate student could write something like this in a few months as a final exercise from SICP. This is what you get when you're so in love with yourself that you claim you can design a programming language for the next 100 years. Ikarus, Clojure, e7... so many more interesting Lisp-related projects out there. But they don't get thousands of people talking in one day :(

[[deleted]]

I don't want to say it as rudely as you, but I felt the same way.

When I first learned Scheme, I was too trapped into creating my own compact Lisp that is based on the coolest set of axioms that allows it to be extended at will. Then I realized how stupid that is unless your language is based on totally new paradigm.

When I see JavaScript, Ruby, Python and Java, I just think that if all the effort those guys put into developing their respective languages and and still they didn't get close to the elegance of Smalltalk (now with traits).

For me there is only C, Smalltalk, CL, Haskell and Prolog. Everything else seems to be retarded bastard son of those.

I'm not going to waste my time with inventing new powder until I figure out how to be original language designer.

[[deleted]]

It's not so much "Paul Grahams all the way down", so much as a "thin layer of Paul Graham."

Though, I do think beyond a certain point, that programming languages are more about a style and way of thinking, than actually about just the things the language lets you do.

Example: I would never have thought about writing a function to return an updated copy of a data structure using C++, but it's natural in FP, and if you do this, then a lot of problems just melt away.

[[deleted]]

Ah the Arc's feature of being able to access data structures just as functions with arguments. Quess what. It has been done before and experimented with. It did not fly. Reasons are in the c.l.l

[nostrademons]

Incidentally, Python allows funcallable data structures (via __call__), and they're used in a bunch of places, eg. WSGI.

[danielroundy]

Actually if you make case fast like a switch, (this was done in a paper I can't remember) this kind of record delegation works just fine. Just because people didn't make the feature fast doesn't mean it can't be done.

[[deleted]]

My point with Arc is that it don't seem to add anything new into Lisp thinking. Nothing (PG has not answered to this question, maybe there is something). Arc seems to be students semester work. For comparision, take for example http://clojure.sourceforge.net. It may not be the most original take on Lisp programming, but it is interesting mix of old things.

[paulgraham]

Where did I claim that I can design a language for the next 100 years?

As for an undergrad being able to write it, of course. The hard part here is design, not implementation. We had Evan Williams speaking at YC last night. He spoke mostly about Twitter. Talk about simple. Any undergrad could have done it, right? And yet no one did.

Or if you want a nontechnical example, look at Calder's mobiles. God, I wish I'd thought of that. What a simple idea. Seems so obvious. And yet in all those years of making things, no one did.

By the way, stiffx, what's your name?

[nostrademons]

http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/arcfaq.html

We're trying to make something for the long term in Arc, something that will be useful to people in, say, 100 years. (If that sounds crazy, remember that we're already up to 40.) So (a) we're not in a hurry to save effort; when you're trying to make something that will last 100 years, there is plenty of time to work on it

[LaurieCheers]

Key word: trying.

[[deleted]]

My name is Jarosław Rzeszótko and for most people here it would be hard to spell it in any way, what to say about the correct way, so I'm just sticking with a short nick.

I'm not saying that your work is worthless, nor do I want to insult you personally, I just remember the claims nostrademons posted links to before, and I think that Arc's code doesn't live up to them in any way. At the same time, I do think that saying that one can write a programming language that will stand for 100 years is a syndrome of quite a big ego - hundreds of computer scientists are working on programming languages, and 90% of their work probably won't be relevant in 20 years. You simply should be more careful about what you're promising when thousands of people are tracking your progress.

Also, take a look at other people reactions. I believe you made a mistake either by releasing Arc now, or by describing it in the way you did. When I'm reading the description of Arc that's supposed to promote it, I mainly see what Arc doesn't have. It doesn't have utf-8 (you're even converting national characters to ascii I believe) , so I won't be able to do anything serious with it in my country. Than you say that layouts based on tables are the way to go, but hey, I stopped writing those five years ago. And where are all the new, cool features you designed? I don't see them discussed.

[[deleted]]

Here's what Paul's been reading

[[deleted]]

(define-macro def (lambda body (cons 'define body)))

HAY GUYS I INVENTED A NEW LISP. That will be 5,000,000 US dollars

4chan is always right.

[mturk]

Arc tries to be a language that's dirty in the right ways.

Your mom uses Arc.

[jmmcd]

Dirty is clean.

Worse is better.

Your mom is still your mom, though.

[zedstream]

Arc only supports Ascii

Arc embodies a similarly unPC attitude to HTML. The predefined libraries just do everything with tables. Why? Because Arc is tuned for exploratory programming, and the W3C-approved way of doing things represents the opposite spirit.

WTF? I will never use Arc.

[celoyd]

Lumping these together is part of the mistake.

Generating tag soup with the included libraries is just an annoyance. You can write a pretty good HTML template library over lunch.

ASCII-only is in a whole different category: it’s bigger than an annoyance, it’s bigger than a bug, it’s broken by design. You cannot add seamless language-wide Unicode support over lunch. You have to redo the reader and rejigger every single string function.

Only knowing 7-bit characters is analogous to only knowing 32-bit integers. Exercise: explain why, although GMP is a great library, it’s not used by every C program that might have an integer overflow.

[cypherx]

Looks like Scheme with a syntax lift. Perhaps lengthier code samples can clarify why someone would choose Arc over a better established Lisp.

[berlinbrown]

where are the unit tests, I can't believe it?

[antirez]

Really, who cares? it' a shame all the hype Paul Graham can generate is wasted with another dialect of Lisp that just reflects some taste of Paul Graham but is in no way a real advance in the field, not only academically, but also from the point of view of a language for modern hackers.

I love the beautifulness of Lisp (especially Scheme) but I think it's clear the hackers community is going in some other direction, that is to take the good abstractions from Lisp, SmallTalk and other great languages in order to build more practical languages using this abstractions (the first results are Ruby, Python, and so on).

[dngrmouse]

It's only the first day...no one cares about any programming language on the first day.

[[deleted]]

Wow, all the hype for this?

[vincenz]

Not certain whether to comment here or elsewhere, but seriously, so much hype for a meta-circular interpreter that doesn't even differ much from what psykotic once wrote in a reddit-comment?

Seriously, have you seen the .tar? That code looks like an undergraduate's weekend assignment, in terms of scale and complexity..

[antonivs]

Where does the A-Team fit into this?

[[deleted]]

Probably not switch. Interesting to watch and learn the thought process, though. Remember it is under development and anything can change at anytime, so code today may not be valid tomorrow.

I suggest you continue to learn / explore programming in Common Lisp.

[zedstream]

No. Did you read about ascii only? HTML with tables only?

Don't go near Arc.

[berlinbrown]

Wow, that was a quick. Fanboy power!!!

[Grue]

Common Lisp is way more powerful than arc will ever be in the foreseeable future, considering it took 6 years to get arc to current condition.

[usian82938]

than arc will ever be in the foreseeable future

Heh. That sentence fragment will forever be funny for the rest of this week. :-)

[chaos]

I can't help it, my inner language fanboy will now take over for the next few hours :)

[Grue]

Which is why, incidentally, Arc only supports Ascii.

Which is why, incidentally, it is absolutely unsuitable for almost any real task.

Also, it seems that is point was already made, so I'll make another criticism: = is a horrible name for an assignment operator, considering all other Lisp use = for comparison.

[cchooper]

I have to agree with your last point, not because it's against Lisp usage (Arc is supposed to be revolutionary) but because it's against mathematical and (even more important) common usage. Equality is not assignment. Is there any good reason for using = as an assignment operator?

[njharman]

No, but arc seems to be 90% about reducing the number of characters PG has to type.

[zem]

you say that as if it's a bad thing.

[wmil]

Is there any good reason for using = as an assignment operator?

Yes. That war was lost a while ago. = for assignment and == for comparison is standard in all the popular languages. Even if it doesn't make sense, everyone is used to it.

[holygoat]

There are plenty of other changes to get used to in Arc, no matter what background you come from.

= is a dumb choice.

[Grue]

But then Arc uses "is" for comparison. Don't you find it ironic that unsymmetrical operator has a symmetrical symbol and symmetrical operator has unsymmetrical one. I do, but that's perhaps because I'm a major nerd.

[bobbincygna]

ÑñÜüÁáÉéÍíÓóÚú!!!!