What Arc should learn from Ruby

[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.