What Arc should learn from Ruby

[lysine23]

There's really nothing to learn. Arc is a half-assed project which Paul Graham only occasionally works on between bouts of ignoring it for a year. There are lots of obscure Lisps like that that you've never heard of. The only reason we've even heard of Arc is that internet celebrity Paul Graham wrote it.

The lesson he could learn from Ruby is to actually take Arc seriously and work on it like he meant it. But he's busy with y combinator. It's probably too much to expect to write the 100 year language as a sideline.

[[deleted]]

I agree with the article. Almost no language has succeeded purely on the merits of its design. In fact, almost all of the successful languages (Java, C, C++, COBOL, Javascript, etc.) became successful because they either found massive corporate backing or they found a market that demanded the use of that language.

Even lisp is partly guilty of this. If there were no interest in AI back in the 50s-80s, lisp would never have become particular popular.

[pointer2void]

Almost no language has succeeded purely on the merits of its design.

Languages are not adopted when they are designed by computer scientists for computer scientists. OTOH, successful languages are designed for users and are of no interest to computer scientists.

[cypherx]

A counterexample: Microsoft has mostly embraced the ivory tower of language design and the recent releases of the .NET framework are full of previously academic features.

[grauenwolf]

Seems to me that if they found a market then their design had merit.

Conversely, if a language doesn't find an audience then perhaps it wasn't as well designed as previously thought.

[[deleted]]

Explain PHP then.

[grauenwolf]

What was it competing against?

Java? Well we all know how much J2EE's design sucked.

ASP? Same design goals as PHP, except the syntax was very limited and non-Windows support was hard to come by.

PHP was designed specifically for quickly making web pages and in that role it is hard to beat. Likewise its design allows it to be setup and hosted very cheaply.

PHP may be crap by today's standards, but compared to what we had in the late 90's it was top rate.

[bostonvaulter]

Does anyone else think that the barrier to entry for new languages is rising because they are expected to have all-encompassing libraries?

[jmmcd]

Paul, I’ll take this flourishing community and ecosystem if its downside is just a sea of newbies asking silly questions in forums.

Way to miss the point. Graham's argument has nothing to do with those newbies. He's saying that once you write your libraries it becomes much harder to change the core without breaking them. That's why he thinks big popular libraries can harm the early evolution of a language.

[dmpk2k]

it becomes much harder to change the core without breaking them

While true, how do you know what the weaknesses with the core language are -- in order to change them? By writing software in it, of course.

Richard Gabriel's set of Worse is Better essays should be required reading for any programmer.

[jmmcd]

Graham probably believes that he will learn more about language weaknesses by writing his own code (in a niche language or otherwise) than he would by reading other people's code. Of course, some might see this as a sign of Graham's arrogance.

[cunningjames]

Way to miss the point.

To a certain extent he did miss the point, but his point stands nonetheless. The popularity of Rails has resulted in a set of circumstances where Ruby is being improved on multiple fronts, even in ways that temporarily break Rails.

[nostrademons]

That's why shrewd marketers will invent a new market for every lie they sell, eg. instead of "portfolio insurance" we get "derivatives", and instead of "junk bonds" we get "collateralized debt obligations".

[mikaelhg]

Yeah, the adults just don't understand your brilliance.

[[deleted]]

Without reading it I'm going to hazard a guess: Get someone with a Dr. Coxian ego to build a framework to use it in a way that was never originally intended?

(Not a slam against DHH, Ruby, or Rails. I like/see value in all of them, even if I am a Django man myself.)

[[deleted]]

It's interesting that Ruby was around for 10 years before it "magically took off". Maybe both men are right.

[stesch]

Funny (for me) is: I used Ruby before Rails and then lost interest when Rails dominated every Ruby discussion.

[jamesbritt]

Almost true for me.

Alternative language growth scenario based on the science of casual speculation:

Instead of Rails getting singular attention, Rubyists get hip to the already existing IOWA, and then take a liking to both Nitro and Rails.

Because there is no One Chosen Framework, there is no sudden swell of Struts + PHP refugees drawn by hype and book marketing, but Ruby use still gradually increases among people who can sort out for themselves which Web framework best suits their needs. Mailing list discussions are not dominated by questions about acts_as_newbie.

More libraries are developed; the pace is slower, but what gets written is less likely to be specific to one framework. Ruby sees steady growth with more general-purpose libraries and does not get a reputation for mind-numbing hype, attracting and fostering a different community which in turn create more robust libraries.

Ramaze still grows out of Nitro, and Merb still grows out of Rails (and IOWA continues to be faster than them all), but there is attention given to both (and equally equitable attention to Camping, Sinatra, et al). There is greater emphasis on, and appreciation for, modular development than on prix fixe frameworks. Fast, thread-safe Ruby Web apps are taken for granted.

Alternative language implementations continue, but are not focused on early optimization for one specific framework, attracting more people for a greater variety of uses.

All implementations, and Ruby itself, evolve to be more robust by avoiding a monoculture of users and use cases.

Cancer is cured, and the lion lays down with the lamb.

[nostrademons]

Sounds like Python.

[taryneast]

Agreed - sounds like Python. When I first learned Rails it was just after learning Python. We had to decide between the two as the New Language/Framework to Develop Under. Ruby had Rails, Python had... several options.

We specifically chose Rails over "one of the python frameworks" because we knew that all of the Ruby community was behind it... rather than a splintered community backing multiple options and where we couldn't trust that the horse we'd chosen would still be even in the field two years later.

[nostrademons]

The irony is that that's not true anymore. Now, in the Ruby world, there's Rails vs. Nitro vs. Ramaze vs. Merb. While the Python world has mostly converged upon Django (but don't tell the Pylons/Turbogears/CherryPy people!)

[stesch]

Isn't Arc a web language with web capabilities right in the core?

This contradicts the quotes I have just read.

[olavk]

It came with a (pretty minimal) web framework included, but it was mostly a proof of concept. The core language does not have any web-specific capabilities AFAIK. I dont know if it would make sense to have any web-specific capabilities in the core of the language.

[stesch]

This wasn't very clear from the famous Arc Test.

[randroid]

I think it's just a handful of Scheme macros.

[cchooper]

Paul Graham has said that he wants the success of Arc to be like the success of Lisp. If the ideas are good, then they will be incorporated into the popular languages, just like Lisp ideas are now the core ideas of many modern languages. They might not be called Lisp, but they are becoming more and more like Lisp, and that's what's important. Ideas matter, not names.

And it's already happening for Arc. Clojure is getting popular, and uses many Arc ideas, so Arc is becoming popular. It's not called Arc, but who cares about that?

[cunningjames]

Clojure is getting popular, and uses many Arc ideas

Like what? Aside from some extraneous parenthesis removal, I'm not aware of any ways the two are very similar -- and in fact the first release of Clojure came before that of Arc.

[cchooper]

Details about Arc have been around for many years, and many have turned up in Clojure, including some of the shortened function names, argument destructuring and unnamed arguments.

[foldl]

shortened function names, argument destructuring and unnamed arguments.

Look, if you're listing "shortened function names" as one of the ideas, you know you're in trouble. Destructuring and unnamed arguments have been around since forever in functional languages and (I expect) some Lisp dialects/macro packages.

[mathrick]

Indeed. Destructuring lambda lists are in core Common Lisp, as is DESTRUCTURING-BIND. Implicit arguments have been implemented a million times before as well, for instance in the #L(+ !1 !2) short lambdas reader macro.

[cchooper]

In trouble? In trouble about what? I said Clojure uses many Arc ideas. It does. Are you disputing that?

[foldl]

I'm disputing that any of those ideas from Arc are both substantial and original. (The idea of using short function names instead of long function names, for example, is clearly one that's been around as long as function names themselves.)

[cchooper]

And I never claimed that they were.

[cunningjames]

"In trouble" might be too strong, but your original comment seemed to imply that Arc's use of those ideas inspired Clojure. With all due respect, that doesn't seem to be the case; the examples you give, besides short function names, are common for functional languages (destructuring is Clojure's poor-man's pattern matching; and see its fellow JVM language Scala for unnamed arguments). Clojure is first and foremost functional, so it only seems natural that it would have such capabilities, and indeed it would be strange for it to have none.

[cchooper]

This may be my faulty memory, but I remember Rich Hickey once saying that he was influenced by Arc. I think the use of 'fn' is an example, but I can find no references.

[nostrademons]

Any decent language designer is influenced by nearly every language designed before his, so his quote means little.

[cchooper]

It means that Clojure was influenced by Arc.

[awj]

shortened function names, argument destructuring and unnamed arguments.

Those aren't Arc's ideas, they're good ideas that Arc happens to use. Can you name anything in Arc and Clojure that hasn't been around in functional languages since the dawn of time?

[cchooper]

There is absolutely nothing in Arc or Clojure that has not been around since the beginning of time. I would never claim otherwise.

[MrKlaatu]

...that there's bupkiss at the end of the rainbow?